


tried living in the moment

by Emamel



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Drinking, Eventual Relationships, Except Georgie RIP, Fix-It, Gay Richie Tozier, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Relationships, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Richie and Stan leave Derry together, Stanley Uris is a Good Friend, bi stan uris, mentions of others - Freeform, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-01-21 13:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emamel/pseuds/Emamel
Summary: In which Richie moves out, drops out, freaks out, comes out, makes out, freaks out (again), goes out, and freaks out some more; not necessarily in that order.Stan gets dragged along for more of the ride than is probably reasonable to ask of a best friend.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Richie Tozier & Everyone, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Comments: 39
Kudos: 162





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, a few things:  
1 - this was originally posted under the same name with only the first chapter as a standalone. I've written enough now that I feel more comfortable posting more (with a new summary, yay!) nut I'm still being realistic with my own brain, so if you want to know what happens without having to wait for me to actually update a WIP, there's an overview of events on my tumblr https://theaceace.tumblr.com/post/188593194737/because-i-cant-seem-to-make-my-words-do-the  
2 - I've never written a Jewish character before, and Google can only tell me so much. Although this story is told from Richie's perspective, and there are things he doesn't know/gets wrong, if there's something _I_ get wrong, or is in any way offensive, please please PLEASE come scream at me about it  
3 - following on from that, I haven't read the book. I'll get to it one day, but in the words of Bill Hader, it's like fifteen hundred fucking pages. SO this is film verse  
4 - any characters that aren't part of the world of IT are sneaky crossovers  
5 - any characterisation you don't recognise from any of the canons (esp. with regards to Richie) is most likely me projecting very hard on the repressed neurodivergent queer kid from a rural town, to the surprise of literally no-one that knows me
> 
> If you're still reading after all that, hope you enjoy!

Richie is fourteen, and sometimes his heart feels so full that it could come spilling right up out of his throat if he let it. Usually he blames acid reflux when someone points out the expression that comes with it, and endures the worried nagging that comes from the general area of his left shoulder, words running together a mile a minute. And people say _he_ talks too much.

Today he grits his teeth instead and grins uncomfortably wide just to watch Bill shiver.

“You look like a psychopath,” Bill says on the third try, but the disgust in his voice is mild and overrun by fondness, so Richie counts it as a win. Mike chuckles to himself from where he’s curled up on the ratty couch cushions they’ve piled high in the corner of the clubhouse. He has his nose buried in one of the books Ben left behind and is pretending not to watch them.

“When _doesn’t_ he look like a psychopath?” Eddie says from somewhere in the vicinity of Richie’s left foot. They’re both too tall for the hammock even on their own, but it hasn’t stopped them clambering over each other, with sharp knees digging into ribs and limbs sprawled carelessly over the edge of the fabric.

“That’s some pretty brave talk coming from someone that close to my athlete’s foot, Spaghetti,” Richie says lightly, and taps his foot against Eddie’s cheek. It’s partly a serious threat, but mostly because he _knows_ exactly how Eddie will screw up his face in response. These days he’s a lot more easy-going about the germs thing – splashing around in sewer water to murder a demon clown had to be good for something Richie supposes – but he does still have his limits.

“Beep beep Richie,” Stan says without looking up from his paper. “That’s disgusting.”

Of all of them – at least, all of them still in Derry – Stan has the nicest handwriting. Neat, blocky little letters that look like they’ve all been measured out with a ruler, unlike Bill’s chicken-scratch, or Eddie’s rushed scribbles. Richie has a bad habit of zoning out and blanking whoever is dictating the letter to him, and besides, his writing looks like the loop-de-loops on a rollercoaster. Mike’s writing is nice enough, but he prefers to help them sound the letters out than write them himself.

Privately, Richie wonders why they still bother. It’s not like they’ll get a reply.

Bev had tried. Richie honestly believes that she’d tried. He can’t _not_ believe that, because that would mean believing that long nights curled on his side with his head in her lap trading a cigarette back and forth in easy silence meant nothing. Or the way he caught her looking at Bill with that little blush just starting to creep up her neck that she always said was sunburn meant nothing. Or the way she rubbed her face in Stan’s hair to wipe away the tears Richie pretended not to notice when they all piled on to say goodbye on her last day in Derry meant nothing.

And Richie couldn’t believe any of that. So he has to believe that she’d tried to keep in touch with them. Her first few letters were only days apart, long and rambling, and full of the sights and joys of the city, polaroids hastily shoved into the envelope and signed off with a string of scribbled kisses. Except days turned to weeks; the letters got shorter, the kisses vanished, until she could have been writing to a distant relative, the sort that Richie had to sit down and write thank-you notes to after every birthday even though they hadn’t seen him since he hit puberty.

Ben had written them twice. The last letter they sent had been returned unopened.

Richie tells himself it wasn’t that surprising – they all knew Ben’s dad had to move around a lot for work. They’ve probably just moved again, and Ben hasn’t got around to sending them his new address.

He doesn’t know if he still believes that.

It’s okay, though. Sure, they’d fought a killer shapeshifting clown together, and that was probably the sort of thing that brought people together, formed an unbreakable bond or some shit. Sure, there’d been countless nights sneaking over to each other’s houses when none of them could sleep alone without screaming. Sure, they hadn’t spent longer than a day apart, collectively. Sure, despite everything, they had somehow been some of the best days Richie can remember.

But it’s okay. Ben and Bev are moving on with their lives, and that’s _okay_. Really. It’s good, for them.

Richie just thinks it would be better if the other Losers didn’t still insist on writing these fucking letters.

It won’t be that when Bill leaves, he tells himself. They have a few months left, before his parents drag Bill halfway across the country, as though they’ll ever be able to outrun Georgie. As though buying a house without a spare bedroom will somehow fix the screaming matches Bill climbs out of his window to escape. As though seeing a yellow raincoat in a crowd doesn’t still make Bill’s hands start to shake.

It won’t be like that when Bill leaves, he tells himself. He doesn’t know if he believes it.

Richie is fifteen, and these days he spends a lot of time feeling like his heart is about to crack a rib or two. Sometimes he can feel it beating so hard he’s sure it must make his whole body shake – there’s nothing to him after this latest growth spurt, nothing but joints and twiggy limbs in between. Eddie complains that he can count every one of Richie’s vertebrae through his shirt, and then proceeds to steal half of his lunch almost daily. Not that Richie blames him – he wouldn’t want to eat whatever it is that Mrs. K packs. But then Eddie pats his back as though to prove his point, and Richie’s heart starts up its juddery shit again, until he feels like he’s rocking back and forth with it, _thump-thump joy-terror sway-sway_.

Eddie hasn’t noticed (yet).

Stan has.

Bill probably would’ve noticed too, by now, if he were still here. He also wouldn’t have waited this long for Richie to come to him, the way Stan has. Bill was always a lot less patient than people gave him credit for, and he’d never been afraid of calling Richie on his bullshit.

But Bill hasn’t phoned them in months. Hasn’t sent a letter, or even a damn postcard.

If he thinks about it too long, Richie’s heart starts a whole different pounding. _Thump-thump-thump-thump fear-sweat-shake-terror._ The sort of fear that sends cold sliding down his knobbly spine, that comes with a missing poster, with blank-white eyes in a carved face, with a coffin left silent and dusty and undisturbed because no-one had come looking for him, because no-one had wanted to find him, to find _someone like him_. It isn’t like that, he tries to tell himself late at night as he shudders awake. Bill would look for him, if something happened. Bill wouldn’t leave him there to rot, would hear him screaming even with his mouth sewn up tight. Bill wouldn’t just _not call_.

He knows, he _knows_ that there’s something very wrong.

Richie knows that. He isn’t sure how much he _believes_ it.

From under his nose, another chicken nugget disappears. Richie rolls his eyes and pretends it isn’t fucking cute that Eddie doesn’t even try to be subtle anymore. Pretends he isn’t grateful to be dragged back into the conversation.

Across the table, Stan’s eyes glint, and Richie wonders with a sudden thrill of fear, if this is where his apparently limitless tolerance for Richie’s crisis ends. If he’s finished watching Richie the way he watches his birds, watching Richie’s fucking _mating ritual_ or whatever he probably calls it in his head, if he’s about to tear it all down now in the goddamn cafeteria –

“Can I have a nugget, Richie?” He asks innocently. Richie narrows his eyes into something like a glare.

“Get your own damn nu – wait _can_ you even have chicken nuggets? Are they – what is it, kosher? Fucking hell Stan, have you ever had chicken, here, shit, Eddie give him your nugget-”

Eddie rolls his eyes at Richie and shoves the whole thing in his mouth.

Stan rolls his eyes at both of them.

“Richie you’ve seen me have chicken, I know you’ve seen me have it, you know that I know you’ve seen me have it for fuck’s sake.” Stan is grinning though, picking at the stem of his apple in quick little movements. One-two-three-pause. One-two-three-pause. He doesn’t reach for Richie’s tray. Richie’s sure he never wanted the damn nugget in the first place. Asshole. “But I see how it is, Eddie can just help himself I guess.”

Very carefully, Richie doesn’t turn to gauge Eddie’s reaction. He thinks he sees him duck his head, shoulders curling in and chin jutting, and he definitely doesn’t miss the way Stan twitches in his seat like he’s just been kicked. Instead, he pulls his mouth wide into a smile and shrugs, loose and expansive, with his whole body.

“Well, Eddie’s a growing boy now, isn’t he?” He croaks in his best impression of Tina The Dinner Lady. She has a soft spot for Richie and all of his sharp angles, insists on scooping just a little extra onto his tray. Not that he gets to benefit from it. “But you, you whippersnapper, you’re nearly as tall as me now, you don’t need the extra energy for all that – ow!” One kick to the shin and one elbow in his ribs, almost simultaneously. He really needs to figure out how they do it – it’s uncanny.

“Beep beep asshole,” Eddie says, and steals his jello.

Richie is sixteen, and the world is ending. Or maybe it’s just that he is. He can feel his heartbeat behind his eyes, where his head is heavy and slow.

Eddie looks about as good as he feels, which is a cold sort of comfort.

None of them have spoken in a while, and the silence isn’t comfortable. It’s pressing. Final. Richie isn’t sure he even really heard any of what Eddie was saying beyond _moving_. Eddie paced the room for five minutes while the blood roared in Richie’s ears, unable to stay still for longer than two seconds together. His frantic, nervous energy had always been so different to Richie – his steps were tight, controlled, and every movement of his hands was sharp and tight, held close to his chest. Richie talks with his hands too, but in a way that makes people give him a three-foot radius; arms swinging wide because his words are too vast to be just noises.

Eventually, though, Eddie had run out of steam, and had folded to ground where he’d stopped. Had put his head down in his hands and blew his breaths out between his teeth. Had curled into himself when Stan and Mike put careful hands on his shoulders.

Richie wants to get up. He wants to sit next to Eddie and – he doesn’t know. He can’t plan that far ahead, can’t get himself past the first step of just getting up from where he’s sat on his bed, knees pulled up to his chest. Because this isn’t about him. He knows that, he does. Knows that he needs to be there for Eddie, who looks like he’s seconds away from grabbing for his inhaler; the one he doesn’t carry anymore. Knows he should crack a joke, should say something about Eddie’s mom, because if Eds is angry with him then at least he won’t be fighting back tears and pressing his mouth into a hard little trembling line.

But Richie can’t do any of those things. Can’t even be cowed by the look Stan shoots him over Eddie’s shoulder.

Less than two weeks. Less than two weeks until Eddie is out of Derry, and out of their lives. Probably forever, if the other Losers are anything to go by. Bill had promised to phone at least once a week, and write as much as he could, and look how that had turned out.

If even Bill – who is _constant_, who is _steady_, who had been Richie’s friend since before either of them could remember – couldn’t resist whatever it is that happens when they leave Derry, then how can they expect it to be any different for Eddie?

Not when Mrs. K already limits the time he can spend out with them now that Bill – the only one of the Losers she even sort of liked – is gone. Not when she stands at Eddie’s shoulder and times him when he’s on the phone, often hanging up immediately if she hears Mike’s voice down the line. Eddie doesn’t know the new address yet, and Richie thinks that at some point during his rambling, he’d promised to send it to them at the first chance he gets – but he isn’t sure. He hasn’t heard anything clearly.

Still doesn’t. Eddie’s voice sounds like it’s echoing down a long sewer tunnel.

“Rich?”

Richie jerks like he’s been punched, and swings bodily to face Eddie. He blinks swollen eyes, and realises that he’s probably been crying for a while. That isn’t like him – he never cries quietly. He scrubs his knuckles across his cheeks quickly; tumbles to his feet and trips his way over to Eddie’s side before collapsing down next him. He feels drunk – no, he feels worse than drunk, because this has all of the rolling nausea, all of the burning throat, and none of the pleasant haziness that comes with alcohol.

Eddie stares miserably up at him, still valiantly trying not to cry; even though Richie can taste salt when he licks his lips. He looks like he’s searching for something, and Richie’s chest _twists_ because he doesn’t know what it is but he’s scared that Eddie will find it. Scared that he won’t. Eddie sways, just a little bit, in and then back out. Like he wanted to press close and thought better of it.

_Probably doesn’t want to risk getting too close to all the snot_ Richie thinks, and definitely doesn’t consider all the other reasons Eddie might not want to get close. Doesn’t think about the impossible pitch of his voice when he’d shrieked at Richie not to touch him in Neibolt.

It takes a conscious effort to shove the voice back down; he lifts his arm and tucks Eddie against his side. Eddie slumps immediately against him like he’d been waiting for permission.

“’m sorry,” he mutters, and Richie very generously pretends he doesn’t hear how thick Eddie’s voice is. “I really didn’t know until this morning, Rich.”

As though Eddie has a single fucking thing to apologise for in all of this. As though it’s somehow his fault that Richie can’t cope with his own emotions and shit.

“Not mad at you, Eds,” he says. Eddie doesn’t say anything, but he pushes Richie at the name – too lightly to actually put any distance between them. Richie tightens his arm a little, presses his chin down on Eddie’s head; doesn’t let himself press his mouth to the spot. “I hate this whole fucked-up situation, but it’s not like any of it’s your fault. I’m just, y’know, thinking about how much I’ll miss your mom’s sweet, sweet -”

“Beep _beep_,” Eddie manages through a watery laugh, and this time he really does shove Richie hard enough to knock him onto his side. Richie goes down giggling, can hear Stan and Mike’s reluctant little chuckles. They’ve both been oddly quiet about the whole thing.

By the time he sits back up, Stan is leaning against Eddie’s back, and Mike is hanging onto his other shoulder. Richie reclaims his spot, and twists until his knees are hooked over Eddie’s crossed legs. He doesn’t think about it.

“We’ll think of something,” Mike says steadily. “You can take photos of us with you, and journals and things, and as soon as you know the address, we can send you things all the time. It’ll work out, Eddie.” And Richie loves Mike dearly, he really does, but there’s a spiteful little part of him that thinks it isn’t the same for him. Mike hasn’t known Eddie since third grade, doesn’t have every one of his made-up allergies memorised, hasn’t spent years crawling under the covers together at sleepovers to read comics long after Stan and Bill had dozed off. Mike is Eddie’s friend but it isn’t the _same_ because – because –

It just isn’t.

“Yeah, ‘cause it worked so well last time,” Eddie snaps; he immediately looks ashamed of himself. Snapping at Mike has that sort of effect on all of them. Mike takes it in stride.

“Then we’ll try harder this time,” he says gently, and that’s enough to set Richie crying again. He can feel it this time, the little tremors in his shoulders, the way his mouth shakes when he opens it to try and speak; shuts it again when he realises he doesn’t have anything to say. Speechless twice in one day – Bev would never have believed it, he thinks sadly.

Stan shifts slightly behind them, enough to wrap a hand around Richie’s wrist. His thumb presses to the pulse point, rubs a little in a way that would be soothing if not for the frantic edge to it.

Richie doesn’t know what Stan saw in It’s painting-mouth. If there were deadlights there too, if he’d seen something like Beverly had. He’d asked once, not long after the summer finished – Stan had looked at him with flat eyes and shook his head jerkily, one-two-three-pause, one-two-three-pause.

_No offense, Rich_, he’d said. _But I don’t want to tell you. I’ll let you know if I ever do. Right now, I just want to forget it ever happened._

And Richie doesn’t usually know when to stop – doesn’t know when he’s taken a joke too far until someone _beep-beep_s him, doesn’t know when to stop telling a story because his audience lost interest ten minutes ago, doesn’t know how to tell when enough is enough. But even he knew better than to push Stan on this.

He’s an asshole, but he’s not an _asshole_.

So when Stan places a careful hand over Eddie’s back at lunch sometimes, just enough to feel him breathing; or stares at Mike so long without blinking it makes his eyes water; or tugs Richie close enough to press a hand to his chest or throat or wrist where the skin is thin and the blood near the surface – they don’t say anything. Stan has his ways of coping.

Except this time, he isn’t comforting himself.

Richie shoots him a grateful look when he starts outlining a plan of action – Stan likes to have definite plans, almost as much as Mike does. They trade ideas at lightning speed over Richie and Eddie’s heads, while Richie just nods along from time to time only halfway listening, and Eddie presses himself impossibly smaller and tighter into the huddle they’ve made. Stan will fill him in on the important details he’s missed later.

By the time they leave, a couple of hours later, not only is Richie fairly sure they sketched out a decent plan of attack on whatever brain-thing it is that afflicts everyone who leaves Derry, but they’ve also all managed to eat half their weight in mars bars and got through two of his newest Daredevils, with Richie doing all of the voices. He’s reaching for the third when Mike stands and stretches, says that he has to head out if he wants to get back before dark. Stan mumbles something similar, and offers Eddie an uneasy smile as he leaves.

And then it’s just the two of them.

Eddie’s silent for a few minutes longer – it isn’t like him at all, and nausea settles deep in Richie’s gut until he has to start swallowing back bile. For all that everyone complains about Richie being too loud, or talking too much, Eddie can out-talk him any day of the week. His sentences run at a hundred miles an hour, he interrupts and talks over people, and he has a mouth that would put a sailor to shame; he’s just cute enough that people let it slide.

“Is it okay if I stay over tonight?” Eddie asks finally. Richie frowns down at him, but he won’t look up, won’t meet his eyes.

“Well yeah, my parents won’t care, but won’t your mom freak?”

“_Fuck_ her,” Eddie spits, all acid and fury. He keeps talking over Richie’s hasty _oh trust me, I’m going to_. “I’m not a _kid_, and I don’t care what she wants or if it upsets her, she’s making me move to a whole other _state _and I’m probably never going to see any of you ever again because my brain’ll get all messed up as soon as I leave Derry, I’m going to _forget_ this and I won’t even care because I won’t _remember_ I -” He’s speeding up, impossibly, hardly breathing as words spill faster and faster until Richie starts to panic alongside him.

“Eds, Eds look at me!” Richie takes Eddie’s cheeks between his palms – he’s lost most of his baby fat now, is starting to grow into his angles, and even with his eyes blown wide like this, they don’t seem to take up half his face the way they used to. “Look at me, Eds, and slow down a minute.”

Eddie nods as best he can manage with his face squished in Richie’s hands. Richie waits until his breathing is approaching normal again before he lets go, just long enough to grip at Eddie’s arms. Those wide eyes flick down for a half second before he meets Richie’s stare again.

Richie doesn’t have the words for this. He doesn’t know what Eddie’s searching for when his gaze flits back and forth across Richie’s face, doesn’t know what he needs to say to drain the last of the panicked tension from Eddie’s shoulders. So he sucks in a deep breath, and tells Eddie what he believes.

“You know what? Okay, yeah. Fine. You’re probably going to forget. None of the planning we did helped with Billy, and we have no way of knowing if any of the new shit we’ve spouted today will be different. _But!_” He gives Eddie’s shoulders a quick shake, grinning at the scowl it elicits; apparently a purely instinctive reaction to his bullshit. “None of that matters, Spaghedward. No, it _doesn’t,_ I’m trying to be sincere dickwad, will you let me finish? It doesn’t matter because _I’ll_ be here – and Stan, and Mike. We’ll be here, and _we_ won’t forget, and if you think I’m going to let little things like state borders and your colander-brain and thousands of miles of distance stop me from annoying your cute face, then you clearly don’t know me at all.”

Richie pauses to consider.

“Also, I’ll be having phone sex with your mom twice a week _minimum_, she can put you on the line after – hey!”

Eddie is laughing as he thumps Richie with a pillow, and he keeps laughing until Richie beats an undignified retreat downstairs to ask his dad if Eddie can stay the night.

Richie is seventeen, and he’s falling asleep where he stands. He’s been up since four in the goddamn morning; he’s freezing, and tired, and gross, but fuck he can feel his blood rushing beneath his skin, and it feels _amazing_. Mike nudges him, a knowing little smile on his face.

_Eddie would have hated this_ he thinks, and it only hurts a lot.

He’s been spending a lot more time with Mike and Stan now that it’s just the three of them left in Derry. His parents wave him out the door with absent smiles and requests that he let them know if he’ll be back for dinner before four most days; Richie doesn’t know if the distance is because of whatever happens to people that have lived in Derry too long, or if it’s just part of growing up. If they’re happy to get him out of the house, or just happy that he’s spending so much time with his friends.

Even if that time at Mike’s means helping with lambing.

He’s covered in what he can only describe as lamb-juice up to his elbows, and there’s probably a long streak of it across his forehead where he forgot about the state of his arms and tried to wipe away his sweat before it could freeze to his skin. He’s wearing approximately twenty layers and he can’t feel his toes. It’s warm in the barn but the wind curling under the door is frigid.

But there’s a lamb struggling to its feet next to him, unsteady and gangly as Richie after his first growth spurt.

A surprised bark of laughter crawls up his throat before he has a chance to shove it back down – Mike claps a hand to his shoulder and chuckles. Mike is broader than Richie, who is still built like a beanpole; years of manual labour around the farm have clearly paid off, and Richie sometimes finds his eyes snagging on the line of his shoulders, or the warm skin of his back when he strips his shirt off in the summer sun. Usually he catches himself before he can stare long enough to make it weird, and besides, there’s never any kind of intent behind it. Mike’s just growing up handsome, is all.

Richie’s found that he doesn’t mind helping around the farm as much as he thought he would. The work is hard and exhausting, but it leaves his mind and mouth free to run as fast as he would like; and Mike is always happy to listen, even if he doesn’t return with the same scathing commentary as Stan. During the summer they had all spent a lot of time out here – Mike’s responsibilities have been growing exponentially and if they want to have even a hope of seeing him at all, that means heading to the outskirts of Derry and throwing themselves into silaging, or shearing, or whatever it is that the season calls for. But now, between school and long hours of homework and Stan being pushed to help around the temple more and more, they only seem to have weekends free – to which Stan shrugs and offers ‘shabbat’ apologetically.

And Richie misses him at times like this – but at least he can still see Stan around school, and spend evenings at each other’s house with piles of essays and books stacked unsteadily around them, because Richie feels like he’s physically incapable of beginning homework without some sort of outside influence. Now he only sees Mike if they’re – in the words of Mike’s grandfather – making themselves useful.

“So,” Richie says slowly, dragging it out. “Did you look through all those shiny brochures I lent you yet? Find the perfect campus? Got a five-year plan? Shit, wait, sorry, twenty-five-year plan?”

“Richie-”

“Because, like, I genuinely have no clue how you’re supposed to decide where to go, I mean, are you meant to feel a calling or something? Do you look at a building and go ‘ah, yes, I can see myself giving them a hundred thousand dollars’? Like should I be paying attention to league tables or whatever? How much do they tell you?”

“Rich, I don’t -”

“And shit, how’s it going to work at the holidays and stuff? Am I gonna remember to come back here for Christmas, or summer? I guess I could just go to UMaine, I might still be close enough that I would kind of remember enough? We never figured out if there’s a geographical range to this shit did we, that would be one way to test it, if I can even -”

“I’m not leaving, Richie,” Mike cuts in, consonants bit off harshly between his teeth. Richie stops mid-ramble and freezes, arms stretched wide where he’d been illustrating his point with restless fingers.

Slowly, he turns to face Mike.

“What?” He says. It’s a gasp that takes three tries to push past his closing throat. It’s funny, he thinks wildly. He always used to tease Eddie for thinking he had asthma. “Mike?”

“Rich,” Mike says, and his mouth is curved down, and his eyes are so sad, and his voice is so soft. “One of us has to stay. We can’t all forget about – about _It_.”

“It’s _dead_,” Richie stresses. “If there is a single good thing to come out of forgetting this entire fucking town, it’s that I’ll be able to go to a circus and only want to murder the clowns a normal amount because It’s _dead_ and I won’t _remember_ that It ever existed.”

“And if it isn’t? What, are we supposed to just pretend like -”

“We wouldn’t _be_ pretending, Mikey! We wouldn’t know, we wouldn’t remember! What, is this -” Richie swings to point behind him, in the vague direction of Derry “your twenty-five-year plan? Stay here and let Derry drain you until you’re sure it isn’t coming back? Let this place fuck up your life even more than it has already? Mike, you could _get out_!”

“_No_ Richie, I _can’t_, because one of us has to stay here and we both know it won’t be you or Stan!”

Richie flinches back. He stares at Mike with wide, wild eyes, and slowly starts to slump down.

Because the thing is – Mike’s not wrong. Somehow, that’s the worst part.

Mike visibly collects himself, breathing deep and slow. His eyes close for a moment, and when he speaks, he doesn’t look at Richie. Richie can feel the beginnings of regret and shame curdle in his stomach like off milk. He clamps his mouth shut against the waves of nausea threatening to overtake him.

“I’m not – I don’t blame you guys,” he says finally, and his voice is so terribly small. Richie’s never heard Mike sound like that before. “You deserve to go somewhere else, anywhere else -”

“Oh what, like you don’t?”

“_And_,” Mike adds, talking over Richie’s outraged splutter. “My grandad, my uncles – they won’t be around forever. I’ll inherit the farm, I’ve got a life and responsibilities here, even if it’s not what I want. You – let’s face it, Rich, this place would drive you mad after a couple of years, and I know Stan’s planning to leave as soon as he graduates. And I mean, at least this way Stan won’t be alone after you go off to whatever college you end up at, right?”

Richie blinks.

_You left me! You’re not my friends!_ Stan’s squeaky pre-pubescent voice clangs between his ears.

So.

Here’s the thing.

Richie knows that Stan is younger than him. He knows that he’s a grade below – hard not to, now that Richie’s the only one of the Losers left in his class, and he doesn’t have any other friends. But somehow it hadn’t occurred to him – or rather, he hadn’t wanted to think about how that meant he’d be graduating a year before Stan. How he’d be leaving for college a year earlier.

How he’d be forgetting about them a year earlier.

There’s nothing he can do about Bev, or Ben, or Bill, or – or Eddie. He doesn’t know where they wanted to go to college (_if_ they wanted to go, he always just assumed they would because his friends are a bunch of brilliant, talented assholes) and if that’s changed now that they don’t have Derry’s influence hanging over them. He could try to find them, he supposes, but –

He doesn’t know if that would make things better or worse for them. Would they remember him? Would _he_ remember _them_ by the time he caught up to wherever they all were?

“Right,” Richie says faintly. “Sorry – Mike, I’m sorry. I didn’t think,” and from there it’s easy, to let his trashmouth take over, to grin and joke and ease the worried lines between Mike’s brows while he thinks and plans.

Richie is eighteen when puts his plans in motion.

His parents’ response to him deferring his college entry a year had been cautious smiles, and talk of how a gap year could be good for him, how they were happy as long as he was happy. Despite the fact that his heart had sunk down into the very pit of his belly, Richie had, for once in his life, managed to say all the right things and stay perfectly calm and convincing. He’s a little less tactful with Stan.

“So when we go to college,” he says brightly. “Are we going to do the dorm thing? Because I’ll be real with you Stanley, I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope with that sort of restriction on my creative genius.”

Stan cracks open an eye, grunts, and rolls over to go back to sleep. There is a moment of calm before he throws himself upright and clicks on the light.

“_What_?” He shouts. Richie rolls his eyes and thanks his lucky stars that his parents are heavy sleepers.

“Look, I think it’s a relatively simple question,” Richie says, already grinning.

“You,” Stan says then stops. “You aren’t… You’re not going to college this year? You’re not leaving?” _Me_? He doesn’t say, but Richie hears it anyway. He shakes his head, and reaches a hand up to clasp at Stan’s knee, but otherwise doesn’t move from his nest of blankets on the floor.

There are still piles of glossy brochures scattered through his kitchen – some of them are bookmarked as having good media studies courses, or maths, or strong student governments, or mentions of diversity anywhere at all in the summary. There’s no sense in leaving Derry just to go to some other backwards fucking hick place that’ll put that awful resigned look Stan gets sometimes back in his eyes, and make Richie feel like he’s about to crawl up out of his skin. Wherever they end up, it’ll have to be right for them both.

“Not going anywhere without you, Stan-the-Man,” he says, and then panics when Stan sobs, sudden and harsh in the quiet. Stan presses his knuckles into the corners of his eyes and shakes.

“Hey,” Richie says. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay.” And then, before he can snatch the words back –

“But, uh. There’s probably something I should, um. Something you need to know first.”

Stan sniffs, hard, and lifts his head. His eyes are red-rimmed and his hands are trembling.

“I’m. Um, I,” Richie gulps. Gasps. Bites his thumbnail until he tastes blood. “I don’t know if you’ll still want me to stay with you. After, after I tell you.”

“What?” Stan asks flatly. “Did you kill someone besides the evil clown? Burn down half the town? Decide to become a scientologist? Because after everything we’ve been through, man, I think I’d probably still be fine with – well no, maybe not the scientology, but -”

“I’m gay.”

The words don’t feel like they came from his throat, the voice that said them doesn’t sound like his, but he could’ve heard a pin drop in the silence that follows. He curls down lower into his blanket nest.

“Well,” Stan says; slow, considering. “I’d hope so, with the way you used to get around Eddie. Else I’d have to think there was something _really_ weird going on.”

Richie laughs because he doesn’t know what else to do, and crawls up onto the bed when Stan gestures impatiently to him. Stan lifts an arm, the way he used to when they were very small, and all four of them could fit in one bed with ease. Richie tucks himself under Stan’s chin and tries to pretend he isn’t shaking now too.

“I’m glad you told me,” Stan mutters. “I’ll try to remember, when we get out of here.”

“I’ll tell you again if you don’t,” Richie promises thoughtlessly. He swallows a couple of times against the taste of bile coating his mouth.

“Besides,” Stan says; his voice now is deliberately light. It means he’s talking Richie down from the places his mind goes sometimes, when it feels like he’s about to shudder right out of his skull and his thoughts bounce faster and faster and so far beyond his control. Stan’s gotten pretty good at it over the years – Richie relaxes in his hold and lets him. “I’m starting to think it would be pretty hypocritical of me to get weird about you being gay. I mean, I’m still figuring it out, because growing up with you mooning over Eddie, and Ben and Bill gone over Bev kind of screwed up all my notions of how attraction is actually meant to be like for normal people, so thanks for that. But like. I tend to notice boys about as much as I notice girls.”

Richie rears back with a dramatic gasp; Stan knows him well enough that he’s already rolling his eyes.

“_Staniel-the-maniel Uris!_ I should’ve known you had an ulterior motive for getting me in bed! I guess I really am just that irresistible, huh?” He cackles when Stan digs his bony fingers into his sides.

“Go play in traffic,” Stan says flatly, which Richie knows means they’re okay. When Stan is genuinely annoyed with him, his threats get increasingly bizarre and creative. “If I was going to try to tempt anyone into my bed, it’d be Mike.”

“Already talking about other men when I’m in your bed? I’m so hurt, Stan, I can’t believe I trusted you with this, clearly this relationship isn’t working. Although, if you’re going to leave me for anyone, I guess at least it’s Mike. Like, I understand, I would also leave me for Mike.”

Stan snorts.

They talk quietly for a while longer as the acidic knot in Richie’s chest gradually eases. It’s a Friday night, and tomorrow they’ve managed to talk Mike into coming with them to the Capitol for a couple of hours, but they don’t need to be awake early so there’s no pressure to try and get to sleep at a reasonable time.

“Honestly, though,” Stan says finally, when Richie is too tired to keep his aching eyes open. He hums to show he’s still listening. “I’m really glad you told me, Rich. And thank you, for. For sticking with me.”

“Yeah, well, we all know you’d be lost without me,” Richie mumbles, pressing his cheek further into the pillow. There isn’t enough room for the two of them in Richie’s single bed, really, but it’s nice somehow. “But, uh. You too. Y’know. For telling me.”

“Anytime,” Stan says. “As many times as we need, to remember.”

Richie is nineteen, and Stan is eighteen, and they’re both laughing and crying as they crush Mike between them, close enough that Richie’s sure Mike must be able to feel the rabbit-quick thump of his heart through their t-shirts. Stan’s car is packed with their bags because the old station wagon Richie had inherited from his dad is so close to falling apart that he doesn’t think it’ll make it out of Maine. His parents had offered to drive him, but Richie had been reluctant to leave Stan for even that long – he’s fairly sure that they wouldn’t forget each other in the hours between here and New York, but they can’t be _sure_.

Hence – road trip.

“I know we can’t promise anything, but fuck, Mike, we’ll try to remember you,” Richie says. His voice is rough like when he’s doing the Curmudgeonly Old Man Voice, except he can’t switch it off.

“I won’t let him forget,” Stan says, as reassuringly as a man with a face beet-red from crying can. “It’ll be constant. ‘Hey Rich, remember that absolute hunk of a man we had to leave behind? Hey Rich, who was it I was gonna leave you for, again? Hey Rich, I may not remember the town we grew up in, but I definitely remember a spectacular set of abs, and they definitely weren’t yours, any ideas?’”

Mike laughs, and pats both of them on the back as he steps back.

“Yeah, I won’t miss that shit,” he says, gesturing between them. Richie’s breath hitches, and he has to take off his glasses to wipe them on his shirt – they’re all misted up where he’s been crying on and off all morning. “Now go on, both of you, or you’ll never leave.”

It’s said lightly, but it’s a solemn reminder nonetheless. Richie yanks Mike back into another hug.

“Take care of yourself,” he says, utterly serious. “And hey – _slow change may pull us apart when the light gets into your heart, baby._”

Mike’s snickering, but he obligingly replies, “don’t you forget about me.”

Richie nods, once, decisively, and throws himself in the car before he can change his mind. He messes with the radio as Stan says his good byes to Mike, finally settling on some dad-rock station that’s sure to drive Stan out of his mind within the first half-hour. He hangs out the window to wave goodbye to Mike as they drive away, leaning further and further out until Stan yanks him back into his seat by his belt. They both flip off the _Welcome to Derry!_ sign as they drive out of the town. They talk, and laugh, and very deliberately don’t think about anything but the future.

Richie is nineteen, and Stan is eighteen, and he doesn’t remember how they met, or where they’re from, or who any of the people in the photos in their room are; but he knows that his heart is overflowing, and he’s warm, and he’s safe.

Richie is nineteen, and Stan is eighteen, and they’re best friends, they tell everyone. How long have they known each other? Oh, a long time. Where are they from? Doesn’t matter, they’re here now. How did they meet? Well, it’s a funny story, you see…

Richie is nineteen, and Stan is eighteen, and they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. They have each other. Why should it matter if they don’t remember anything from before?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm saying that the slightly different style of each chapter is a metaphor for the different stages of Richie's life, but really I just like playing around

_“So how did you two meet?”_

_“Well, we were both part of the same hypnosis study group, and once you’ve watched a man believe he can carry an eighties power ballad non-stop for twenty minutes, you sort of feel obligated to be his friend.”_

Richie knows a lot about Stan. He knows that he doesn’t have any allergies except mild hay-fever; that he loves birdwatching (and also _birdwatching_, which always gets Richie a cluck of the tongue and a smack to the arm); that he freaks out when Richie tries to do the dishes for them; and that he has an irrational fear of black holes. Richie knows all of these things, and doesn’t remember learning any of them.

Except the dishes thing. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget that.

He doesn’t know where Stan grew up – doesn’t know which high school he went to, or the name of his first pet, or if he had any other friends.

This might have been more concerning, if Richie had known any of those things about himself.

Mostly, they try not to think about it too much. If sets off a series of sparks and stabbing pains behind Richie’s eyes whenever he really tries to remember anything other than vague impressions. He thinks his parents loved him – it feels distant but warm to think of them even in the abstract. He’s sure he’s known Stan for years – they came to New York together, there’s no way Stan would just up and move with someone he’d just met. Sometimes there’ll be a smell, or a voice, or a colour, and his mind flinches away from it so suddenly that Richie is sure there must be a memory there somewhere; but it’s never anything clear. Just notions, and guesses, and dreams.

So many fucking dreams.

It’s the reason Richie’s awake at three in the morning, hunched over the narrow and unsteady stove in the corner of the apartment they generously call the kitchen. He’d woken a sweaty mess with the echo of someone screaming in his ears and his hands clenched tight around his sheets like he’d grabbed for a weapon.

From experience, he knows there’s no getting back to sleep after one like that. So here he is, frying strips of beef for fajitas to last them the next two or three days.

It’s not that Richie likes cooking, because he doesn’t. At best, he’s ambivalent to the whole thing; at worst he sometimes stands in front of the fridge for an hour, staring at the ingredients and trying not to scream because he _can’t_, he doesn’t know why but he _can’t_. So no, he doesn’t like cooking.

But Stan doesn’t just hate cooking – he’s _so fucking bad at it_.

Richie doesn’t really understand. Stan is fastidious in everything he does; he follows recipes to the letter, unlike Richie who just throws things in a pot and prays. And yet, the only thing about Stan’s cooking that can be relied upon is that it’s borderline inedible. So, Richie cooks, and Stan refuses to let him wash the dishes, because he doesn’t do it right.

Up until he’d moved in with Stan, Richie reckons he didn’t know there was a wrong way to wash dishes. He doesn’t remember of course, so he can’t be sure, but that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing past-Richie would know.

People are usually surprised that Richie can cook well enough to keep them both alive and free of vitamin deficiencies. To be completely honest, Richie is surprised by it as well. He’s gradually getting the hang of laundry, and he can’t keep a consistent cleaning schedule, or tidy his room, like, at all – but he can do this. Of all the adulting skills he could have spontaneously developed, he thinks this is a pretty good one.

It’s always a bit of a shock, though, when people ask him why he cooks with so much fresh fish, or vegetables, or lean meat when they can barely afford to keep the lights on, and he finds himself rambling about malnutrition among young adults. The voice doesn’t sit right in his mouth – the intonation is all off, the machine-gun rattle of consonants around his mouth nothing at all like his own lazy drawl. There are statistics that he doesn’t remember when he tries to think of them later, and he doesn’t know how or when he learned any of it.

There’s a muffled thump from the next room – Richie leaps half a foot in the air and spins around with his heart pounding wildly, tongs held in front of him like a weapon. He slumps back and only just avoids burning himself on the hob when Stan appears in the doorway.

“_Jesus Christ_,” he mutters to himself – he rubs his forehead and turns back to the stove so he doesn’t have to see the way Stan’s mouth twists.

“Sorry, wrong Jew,” Stan says back, easy as breathing. It’s an old joke, and Richie doesn’t know how it started. “Couldn’t sleep again?”

Richie grunts; they’re both quiet for a moment. “You?” He asks finally, watching the meat sizzle.

There’s a soft rustle that Richie knows is the sound of Stan pushing his hands through his mop of dark curls. A floorboard creaks, before he throws himself down into one of the lopsided chairs at the table that serves as dinner table/writing desk/pillow when Richie is really tired.

“Couldn’t move again,” Stan whispers finally; his voice is muffled like he’s got his head in his hands.

The meat looks pretty well done by now, Richie thinks – he switches the heat off and sets the pan to the side before washing his hands carefully enough that even… even Stan couldn’t find fault with it. He shakes his head, the little skip in his thoughts already a long way away, and moves to crouch next to Stan.

He knows that Stan won’t react well to being grabbed, or to being forced to look at Richie. There aren’t many things he can do to help when it gets bad like this, so he hooks a hand around Stan’s calf like an anchor, and doesn’t consider why it feels familiar.

“I’m here,” Richie says. “Wouldn’t let anything happen to you, Stanny. Not going anywhere, won’t leave you alone, you’re here, I’m here…”

Richie is fantastic at talking about nothing at all. He can do it for hours, often long after people have stopped listening to him.

Stan always listens.

“Thanks, man,” he says finally, lifting his head from his hands. Richie grins at him and ruffles his hair, curling his fingers gently against Stan’s scalp and thumbing at one of the silvery scars along his temple. Stan always thanks him after Richie talks him back to the present; it’s sweet, but Richie doesn’t think he needs to. Stan’s done the same for him more times than either of them count.

They don’t know what it is about their childhoods that they’ve repressed so much shit this thoroughly, but Richie thinks that’s probably for the best.

Healthy? Absolutely not. But definitely for the best.

Stan shuffles over to the sink to start running water for the dishes as Richie moves back to the chopping board to start going <strike>Eddie</strike> Edward Scissorhands on the peppers. He’s got two papers due that he’s barely started, even with the help of Stan’s colour-coded study plan, but he doesn’t have the room in his mind to stress about it now. He starts whistling Bonnie Tyler and grins almost too hard to continue when Stan starts to sing along softly.

It’s not the worst night they’ve had.

_“Okay, but how did you two meet?”_

_“It was wild night of fiery passion, but alas, I was flying out the next morning, so I left him with nothing but a note and a kiss, and he chased me across the country to declare his undying love for me.”_

“Fuck’s sake, Rich,” Stan says heavily – but he doesn’t leave. He’s already scraped Richie’s hair back into an approximation of a ponytail so that he doesn’t have to hold it back as Richie vomits, but he doesn’t leave. The bathroom really isn’t big enough for them both to be on the floor like this, but he doesn’t leave. There’s a glass of water near Richie’s knee, and a packet of chewy mints tucked into his pocket, but he doesn’t leave.

Richie groans, and narrowly avoids pressing his cheek to the toilet seat. The room is spinning gently; he feels icy-cold and clammy from head to toe.

There’s music with such a heavy bassline that he can feel it through the floor. Richie isn’t entirely sure who’s house they’re at – he thinks it’s someone from one of Stan’s classes. He’ll have to apologise to Stan later for making such an idiot of himself, as well as ruining the night.

Stan casts a disgusted glance at the toilet, and stretches across Richie to pull the flush.

“Do you even chew your food?” He asks – there’s a joke to be made there, Richie’s pretty sure, but he can’t clear his head long enough to come up with it. He grunts something that might be the distant cousin of a reply.

This isn’t the drunkest Richie’s ever been, not even close. In the brief period of time he actually spent at college, he’d made all sorts of regrettable decisions and tried his hand at pretty much every vice available. In the slightly longer period of time he’s spent since leaving college, he’s gone back to try every single one again, to see if the outcomes would be any different. He has a set of repeatable data points now. It’s basically science.

So no, Richie isn’t that drunk. He’s not high. He almost wishes he was, because that would be a better explanation than whatever’s going on with his brain.

Downstairs somewhere – or maybe long gone by now – there’s a beautiful boy that Richie caught glancing his way once, then quickly again. A boy that had shook his head as if in a daze; had apologised in a voice that suggested he didn’t mean a word of it. Richie had grinned, said _it’s okay_ and _happens all the time_ and _I have one of those faces_ while he drank him in. Short enough to tuck comfortably under Richie’s arm when they talked, leaning in close to be heard over the music, a whisper of breath against a long throat. Tall enough that he didn’t have to rock up on his toes to press quick, filthy kisses to Richie’s laughing mouth.

The anxiety that normally presses thorns up his throat when he so much as stares at another man too long had seemed a long way away. Smothered; strangled by alcohol, loud music, and low lights.

Fleetingly, Richie had managed to wrestle enough of his brain back under control to pull away and start to ask for a name, before being distracted by insistent hands at his shirt, tugging him towards the door. It hadn’t occurred to him to try again; Richie’d stumbled along in his wake and tried not to fall flat on his face because he couldn’t drag his eyes away from the curve of his ass long enough to watch where he put his feet.

They’d finally found a corner dark enough, and been drawn back together in seconds.

He loved this – loved the lines of warmth left behind by curious hands, loved the sudden drop in his stomach as all of his blood redirected south. He felt dizzy with want, with _being_ wanted. They barely parted long enough to breathe; Richie can taste rum and coke when he presses his tongue into his eager mouth. That mouth pulls away after long minutes of driving him mad to smear a trail across his scruffy jaw, up to his ear and then his throat.

Richie had gasped at the sting of teeth at his collarbone. Tipped his head back with a breathy laugh and curled his fingers into dark, sweat-damp hair. Pressed his palms against his cheeks to drag that beautiful face back up for another kiss; met pale eyes with a fleeting sense of _wrong_ and –

_Don’t fucking touch me!_

\- staggered back, one hand pressed to his mouth.

There’s a bit of a gap in his memories (_ha! Another one!_) between then and now. At some point he’d made it to the bathroom, and had already evacuated his stomach by the time Stan found him. Richie’s hands keep opening and clenching uselessly in the hem of his shirt, like he’s grabbing for something – or someone.

Stan doesn’t ask what happened, because Stan is objectively the best.

But Richie – Richie wants to tell him anyway.

“It was a -” and here he runs out of words. He vaguely gestures at his head. “Thing. There was a guy, and it was great, and then a thing.”

Huh. Maybe he _is_ drunker than he thought.

“How informative,” Stan says, and it’s dry but Richie knows Stan well enough to know that he’s waiting on Richie to sort his jumbled thoughts. It’s not the dismissal it sounds like.

“A brain thing,” he says, and from Stan’s soft _ah_, he’s starting to get the picture.

Richie doesn’t remember coming out to Stan – or Stan coming out to him, for that matter – but he knows it must have happened at some point. Richie’d asked once, not long after they moved in together, if Stan thought they’d ever hooked up and forgotten. Stan had been startled into laughing so hard he had to brace himself on the kitchen counter so he didn’t fall over, which Richie had tried very hard not to be offended by. He understood, though. It’s never been like that, for them.

Also, Richie may or may not have a definite type; as much as he loves Stan, he doesn’t quite fit the bill.

“You remembered something?” Stan asks, and he’s careful with it, fingers drumming anxiously where he’s laid a hand on Richie’s knee. Stan always gets cagey when Richie asks about memories, which he thinks is kind of unfair – but then, Stan’s not as good at lying, or blustering as Richie is. He doesn’t have any defences except getting cagey.

“Or something,” Richie snorts. “Could’ve been a memory, or just that pesky self-loathing the street preachers are always shouting about.”

“Think it was important?”

Richie pauses, and tries – actually _tries_ – to think about it. Whatever it was, though, has already been screwed up and jammed down to the very bottom of his memory-safe. Or whatever; his metaphors get even weirder when he’s been drinking.

“Dunno,” he says finally. “Probably was but I guess it doesn’t fucking matter now, _shit_!”

It isn’t always like this. There’s usually a layer of quiet fear that blankets him whenever he gets close enough to another guy to reach out, to touch, to _hold_, but it isn’t always like this.

Sometimes, though, the fear isn’t quiet. Sometimes it _shrieks_ at him.

He thinks Stan gets it.

“It’s okay, Rich,” Stan says, and tugs him close for a brief hug, which must be the most horrifying thing because Richie is aware that he reeks of vomit and sour alcohol, and that he’s vaguely damp and sweaty. But Stan doesn’t complain, even when Richie presses a smacking kiss to his cheek. And Richie stands up with him and almost vomits again even though there’s nothing left to bring up but acid, but Stan just rubs his back a little too hard to be soothing until the urge has passed. And Richie knows that Stan was looking forward to tonight, that he’s wasted most of it looking after Richie and now they’re cutting the night short to stagger home and Stan will hold it over him _forever_; but Stan doesn’t leave.

_“No seriously, how did you two meet?”_

_“I was doing a set while very drunk, and I fell off the stage right on top of him! We were both so concussed we forgot we didn't know each other and told the paramedics we were long-lost twins, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”_

There’s a very intricate little dance that Richie does on the fine line between needing everyone to look at him and give him their focus all the time, and needing to make sure no one knows the first fucking thing about him. This sounds, to anyone that doesn’t know him – that is, everyone except Stan – like a complete fucking contradiction, and also impossible. It isn’t impossible, Richie would like to point out, just really tricky and also exhausting. He’s gotten good at it, though.

Four-to-five-minutes-worth-of-material good, at any rate.

These days, he gets pretty consistent chuckles from the audience, and occasionally even an outright guffaw; that always makes him break a little. And sure, maybe it’s just because he practices his sets exclusively at tiny dive bar open-mic nights where everyone is already so drunk that they laugh at the way the room spins when they stand up, but still. It feels _good_. Heady, and powerful.

Richie likes to think there’s a layer of altruism to it, too. He does genuinely like to make people laugh, so it isn’t just about making people pay attention to him. He likes the sense of connection it gives him with all these strangers that don’t know him or care about, but listen to what he has to say regardless.

And sometimes, if he’s lucky, he even gets to listen to what they have to say right back.

There are good hecklers and there are bad hecklers, Richie thinks; which probably isn’t the way most aspiring comedians feel about the situation, but there it is. This woman today had been _fantastic_; quick-witted and barely slurring, and every one of her retorts had given Richie enough to riff off that he probably could have managed a whole new set from it.

Which is what led him to a sticky table in the corner with a crumpled napkin and a pen that he stole from the exasperated barman, scribbling down as much of it as he can remember, because he doesn’t trust his fucking brain to hang on to it all by the time he gets home. He’s chewing on the pen lid with a wild grin on his face – guess he isn’t giving it back when he’s done after all – and writing fast enough that the table rocks with it, sloshing beer over the lip of his glass.

“Hey.”

Richie snickers to himself as he scrawls, and prays that his writing will be legible come morning. It isn’t neat at the best of times, but when he’s drunk and sleep-deprived it turns into a squiggly mess.

“Hey!”

He’ll have to run a couple of things by Stan, of course. He isn’t a hundred percent sure what all of the words she threw at him towards the end mean, or if it would be appropriate for him to use them in a bit even if he is just quoting his new muse; better to be safe than sorry, and risk really insulting someone.

“_Hey_ zhlob!”

Richie blinks and looks up.

The woman from before is standing in front of him frowning, and swaying slightly. It takes a couple of seconds for his vision to focus, and by the time he’s managed to process that she’d been trying to get his attention, she’s already sat down across from him.

“Um,” he says, brain still on the napkin in front of him, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. “Yeah?”

She frowns at him and leans forward, blonde hair falling across her forehead. It looks like she’s in the process of growing it out from a bob or something, and if she’d styled it before coming out, the effort has gone to waste now after a long night of drinking and sweating.

“I wanted to,” she pauses, fumbles for a moment waving a hand and almost knocking Richie’s glasses off where she’s leaned in too close. “I’m apologising. I don’t usually sh – shit, _shout_ like that.” Her frown turns to a glare when she realises that Richie’s laughing at her. She probably thinks he’s still mocking her, but it takes a little while to collect himself.

“Are you kidding?” He asks, delighted. “Madame, that was some of the finest heckling I’ve ever had the pleasure of having screamed at me. Look, I’ve already written this shit down!”

He waves the napkin in front of her face, too fast and unsteady for anyone to actually read. Her eyes try to track the motion for a moment before she groans and slumps down, head on her folded arms. Richie’s smile slips off his face. She’d been laughing as they went back-and-forth, almost a full minute out of his set; it was the most fun he’d had at a gig in months, and it looked like she’d been having a good time too.

“I don’t want you to think that’s the sort of person I am,” she says wretchedly.

Without thinking, Richie pushes his beer across the table. She takes it without much thought either, and takes a long drink.

“No harm,” he says, angling for deliberately light. “I usually deserve the things people shout from the audience. You just gave me more to work with. Besides you looked like you were having fun, and people were laughing, right? So fuck it.” She snorts and takes another gulp of Richie’s beer.

“Yeah,” she mutters, and she sounds miserable. “Fuck it.”

Richie – it’s not that he doesn’t care about people. He cares so much that it makes him queasy, sometimes. But he’s self-aware enough to know that he isn’t always the best at reading them, and he tries too hard or pushes too far when he tries to help. And he can’t be sure, but he doesn’t think this is a cry for help; there’s every chance that his signature brand of help won’t be welcome.

But she looks like a completely different woman now to the one half an hour ago. He wants to make her laugh again.

“Apart from stranger’s beers, what do you drink?” he asks. She glances up at him, startled. He smiles, tries to make it soft – her gaze turns suspicious for a few long seconds.

There’s a moment where the _fuck it_ that crosses her mind again is visible in her expression. When she decides to hell with the consequences, she’s going to put her trust in this total stranger whilst drunk and miserable. It’s the sort of terrible life choice that Richie is familiar with.

“Vodka,” she says finally, and offers him a wobbly smile. Richie grins back and raps his knuckles against the table as he stands.

“You got it,” he says, and it’s easy as breathing.

He comes back with a vodka cranberry for the mystery woman, and two shots of tequila for himself. He throws one back, and toys with the empty glass to give his hands something to do.

“So what sort of a person are you, then, if you don’t want me to think you’re the kind of girl that tears wannabe comedians to shreds?” Richie asks. She swirls her drink for a second, staring into it like it has all the answers to life’s problems.

“The sort of girl that gets dumped, apparently,” she says eventually, and her voice is thick. “I shouldn’t be so upset, I mean, we only went out a couple of times and he thought I was good enough to fuck but not date I guess, but he called me a – well. Doesn’t matter. He called me some things, and accused me of some things, and I left before he could do worse. And I didn’t want to go home because he knows where I live, so I just kept walking, y’know? And when I saw the sign outside I’d already had a couple of drinks, and I thought I could do with a laugh, so I just – and then you were up there, and I got caught up in it, and then I came over here to talk to you, even though I’d probably made you so mad already except I didn’t think about that until it was too late, and you weren’t mad at me anyway.”

It takes Richie a couple of moments to process it all. He’s aware he’s staring at her, his mouth probably gaping a little bit, because he’s nothing if not a sloppy drunk.

“Holy shit,” he says finally. “What a - he's a fucking idiot. Bastard. Fucking – fucking _moron_, are you kidding me?” He has to pause and drink his other tequila, before he gets himself too wound up.

She looks surprised – like she hadn’t expected him to take her side; at least not so vehemently. But Richie – well, he’s known guys like that, slept with guys like that. Somehow it always feels just as shit as the first time. It takes a moment before she relaxes. Richie would like to think that it’s because it’s clear his anger isn’t directed at her, that she can tell she’s safe.

More likely, she’s too amused by his incoherency. Or she’s too drunk to care. Whatever it is, though, she sits back in her chair, and talks, and talks. She’s more softly-spoken than he’d expected given the good-natured curses she’d hurled at the stage earlier, but she’s still razor-sharp.

She wants to be a teacher, she says with a self-deprecating little smile that Richie doesn’t have the energy to begin deciphering. She has three brothers that live with her parents on the other side of the city. She likes camping, and stargazing, and never manages to find the time to do either. She feels familiar in a way that Richie can’t quite put his finger on.

They talk long enough that when the bell goes for last orders – _beep beep – _he startles so bad he almost falls off his chair, which sets her giggling. It does present a problem, though, Richie’s hazy brain reminds him. She’d said she doesn’t want to go home; that her ex-scumbag knows where she lives. It’s probably been long enough that if he had been hanging around, he’ll have given up by now, but –

But she’s starting to fiddle anxiously with her fingers and chew the inside of her cheek. Her eyes dart around the room with a speed that makes Richie’s head spin just watching her.

There’s a thought on the tip of his tongue, and he frowns as he tries to shape it into an idea, pushing it against his teeth until what comes out is –

“Hey, come back to mine.”

Her eyes fly back to meet his with an edge of panic he hadn’t expected. He struggles to parse her expression, but it’s very carefully closed off. She stares at him long enough that he starts to fidget uncomfortably; her eyes narrow, and she tilts her head unsteadily for a moment before she suddenly slaps her palms down on the table and pushes herself up with a decisive nod that would be much more impressive if it didn’t nearly knock her off balance.

“Yeah. Okay, sure,” she says, and drags him up to his feet.

They stumble out of the bar, arms linked and leaning heavily on each other. Richie feels light, giddy, almost. He has people he knows from the radio station, people he works with at the diner, and people he knows through Stan, but he wouldn’t call any of them his friends. He’s always been good at getting people to like – and hate – him, but keeping someone around, well. That’s something else entirely.

His new friend feels natural, she feels right. Maybe it’s just the alcohol talking, but they fit well.

“C’mon, it’s, it’s only a couple blocks,” Richie says, tugging her in the right direction. In the cold night air, their breath mingles like smoke. She’s almost as tall as him in her heels – she must have a good few inches on Stan _at least_, and –

Oh.

_Stan_.

“So. _So. _Sooooo, my roommate has some – I don’t know, some fucking big exam or something tomorrow, so he’ll be asleep,” Richie says.

“Oh, yeah, that’s fine,” she says very seriously, putting a finger to her lips like she’s shushing someone, and fuck she needs to be in their lives forever. “I can be, like, super sneaky.”

Richie shakes his head, dark curls flying into his eyes.

“No, no, no,” he says, equally seriously. “You don’t get it. I am going to slam open the door. I am, I ammmm going to storm the _goddamn_ fort. I will jump on his bed if I have to. I will wake that fucker up if it kills me, and he probably will. But you know what? Fuck it. You have to meet him. It’s a law of the universe. It’s fucking _inevitable_.”

She’s laughing into her hand so hard that she needs to use him to keep her balance. Or maybe that’s the shoes.

True to his word, when they get back to the apartment – slightly larger than the one they shared in Stan’s first two years of college, but barely – Richie wastes a couple of precious minutes fumbling with the keys before he manages to throw open the front door. Naturally, the first thing he does is kick his shoes off, and holler down the pokey hallway.

“Stan!” He calls, in a voice that he hopes will carry to Stan’s bedroom but not to their neighbour. Not that he’s ever actually seen their neighbour; and besides, everyone in the building should be used to Richie’s bullshit by now. “_Stan! _Get your unfairly pert ass out here now!”

There’s a muffled thump, a soft _fuck!_ and some shuffling.

“Richie,” Stan says in that too-level voice he gets when he feels he’s been dealing with Richie too long, and is ready to send him to the shelter or whatever it is you do with friends when you want to get them adopted. _Remember, a friend is for life, not just for Hanukah_ he thinks giddily. “When I said I couldn’t come to your show tonight because I have a big exam tomorrow, I did actually mean that I wanted to sleep the whole night, not that I wanted a wake-up call at – Richie, who is that?”

Stan rounds the corner and stops dead. Richie grins.

“Our new very best friend,” he says solemnly. “She’s staying with us at least tonight but maybe forever because her ex is a piece of shit who knows where she lives. But! Good news! _You_ aren’t a piece of shit!” Richie feels very proud of this leap of logic. Stan looks less than impressed.

“Thank you for that,” he says. “I’m so glad you noticed. Are you going to introduce me to my new best friend, who has, by the way, already overtaken you by virtue of the fact she didn’t wake me up the night before a fucking _exam_?”

Richie waves a hand between them grandly, knocking over the bowl with Stan’s keys in the process.

“Standy Warhol, this is –”

And it is here that Richie runs into a problem. He turns on his heel.

“Did I ever ask your fucking name?”

At this point her soft giggles have progressed to painful-sounding wheezes with the occasional undignified snort thrown in for variety. Richie supposes he and Stan do have that effect on people sometimes. She shakes her head, and struggles to get her breathing under control.

“Patty,” she gasps finally. “Patricia Blum. No, you didn’t.”

Richie nods to himself, because yeah, that sounds like him.

“Patty, this is my brother from probably another mother Stanley-the-manly Uris. Standrew Jackson, this is the greatest heckler to ever walk the Earth, Patricia Blum.”

Stan’s eyes dart between them wildly for a second before he sighs and rubs at his forehead like he’s getting a killer headache. Richie knows that posture. It says _I’m so sick of Richie’s bullshit but I’m about to give up and let him get away with it anyway because it’s easier than arguing_.

“Do you really need a place to stay tonight, or was that just Richie talking shit?” Stan asks, voice gentler than it’s ever been with Richie, which. Rude.

“I – yeah,” Patty says. Stan nods a couple of times, and wanders back out of the room, muttering something about grabbing spare blankets. Patty shoots Richie a bewildered glance; he shrugs slightly.

By the time Stan comes back, they’ve progressed to sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch – not on the couch, of course. Stan doesn’t even have the decency to look surprised – he dumps the blankets and pillows on Richie’s head, politely points out which door leads to the bathroom for Patty, and drifts back out of the room, swearing vengeance on Richie if he wakes up again before his alarm goes off the next morning.

When Stan’s alarm _does_ go off the next morning, Richie and Patty are stood slumped in the kitchen, passing the coffee pot between them because searching for milk and mugs seems like too much effort. Stan walks in, takes one look at them, and visibly fights the urge to turn around and walk back out.

Richie offers him a sickly grin. Neither of them slept – they stayed up all night talking as quietly as they could manage, and it probably shows.

“Good morning, Patty,” Stan says pointedly, and starts fixing toast. There is not, Richie notes, enough for three. He’d be more annoyed by that if it weren’t for the oddly soft way Stan keeps glancing over.

“Good morning, Stan,” she says quietly, squinting against the light filtering into the kitchen. Richie snorts and steals the coffee pot back from her.

“Good morning, Richie,” he says, and takes a long gulp. It’s bitter enough to make his eyes water, and lukewarm to boot, but beggars can’t be choosers and all that. Stan doesn’t turn to look at him, or say anything at all, but Richie can feel the judgement. Stan hands Patty a piece of toast with a smile that Richie hasn’t seen from him before – and here, Richie thought he knew all of Stan’s expressions by now.

Something like jealousy tries to wrap its ugly, wrinkled little fingers around his chest and squeeze (_he’ll leave you, he’ll forget you, he won’t want to spend time with you anymore, you won’t be important to him anymore, he’ll replace you, he’ll-_), but it’s drowned out by the swelling warmth that floods him. He’s _never seen Stan look like that,_ and that means something. Richie hasn’t known Patty twelve hours yet, and most of those were spent drunk, but this feels comfortable. It feels good in the way people laughing at his jokes feels, in the way stretching out next to Stan to watch trashy b-movies that he knows every word of feels, in the way re-reading every one of his old comics when he’s sick feels.

“Thank you both for letting me stay last night,” Patty says eventually, nibbling at a corner of her toast. “And for being, you know. Not murderers.”

Richie chokes on his coffee. Stan leans over to thump his back with a long-suffering look.

“If you were worried about that why did you agree to stay?” He asks incredulously. He’d been too drunk and jittery from post-show adrenaline last night to consider that she might have been afraid of his offer to stay with a complete stranger; he thinks back to the expressions that had flitted across her face, about the way he _phrased_ – oh _god_.

He groans and slides down the wall to sit on the floor, face pressed against his knees.

“Okay Rich?” Stan asks, utterly unsympathetic. Richie grumbles wordlessly.

“Yes, I know you’re an idiot,” Stan says pleasantly, as though he’d given a coherent response. “You don’t even have the decency to be a lovable, bumbling idiot.”

Richie whines.

“I hate you, too,” Stan says. “Maybe next time try to be a little less creepy to women you’ve just met at bars, yeah? Even if they are brilliant hecklers.”

Richie manages a questioning grunt.

“I know you were being creepy because your face does that thing with your eyebrows when you’re drunk, and also you have no filter, trashmouth.”

Richie reaches out to poke Stan’s shin.

“Richie is very sorry he probably implied you’d come back here and have sex with him and/or me, he didn’t mean to, he’s just incompetent at normal human interactions,” Stan tells Patty, very seriously. “The fact that he has actually shut up for longer than ten seconds together is proof that he is extremely embarrassed, and also full of regret. Make the most of it, this only comes around every seven years or so.”

“Right,” Patty says slowly, and the corners of her mouth are twitching when Richie screws up the courage to glance up from the hideous laminate floor of their kitchen. “If it’s any consolation, I sometimes make very bad, impulsive decisions when I’m drunk. And some slightly less bad but still impulsive decisions when I’m sober.”

Richie snorts.

“Yes Richie, we all agree that you are a bad decision, drunk or sober,” Stan says, because he is absolutely the worst.

“I guess you’ll never know,” Richie says, finally regaining the use of his voice. He flutters his lashes up at Stan, who nudges him with a bare foot.

“Oh, no, I’m sure you aren’t that –” Patty starts, but Richie is already shaking his head to cut her off.

“No, no, he’s absolutely right, you’re fantastic and you’re so lucky I’ll never be a decision you make.”

There’s a slight pause.

“What makes you say that?” Patty asks – and there’s nothing flirtatious about it, nothing light-hearted that suggests she actually wants him to be interested in her. Instead there’s something slightly defensive, something that plucks at his memories of last night. Richie is suddenly struck with the fact that, somehow, he needs to pick his next words carefully. And he has a choice; except the warmth from before is still lingering, that feeling of familiarity, and it doesn’t feel like much of a choice at all, actually.

Stan has tensed beside him; he looks like he desperately wants to bury his face in his hands, but is too afraid to move in case he draws attention to himself. Richie is pretty sure he’s missing something here.

“Because I’m really fucking gay?” He says finally.

Stan’s breath leaves him in a shocked huff like he’s just been punched, and yeah – so Richie can’t remember ever actually _saying _the words before. So what? He knows he must’ve told Stan at some point, and there are several guys in New York that had figured it out pretty quick. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

He lurches to his feet and barely makes it to the sink in time to vomit up half a pot’s worth of coffee.

In the background, he thinks he can hear Patty asking if he’s okay, and Stan muttering that he’ll be fine, that this is actually a pretty big moment for him, and also, he’s just like this.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Patty offers hesitantly. “A couple of my cousins are gay, and –”

“Please don’t ask if I know them,” Richie interrupts. It’s almost snappy, and a lot ruder than he wants to be after this big, touching moment, but he can’t… He _can’t_ have a serious conversation about this now, can’t take Patty trying awkwardly to comfort him when he isn’t even really sure _why_ he needs the comfort. He needs to make a bad joke about this, and not think about it for a couple of days, or preferably ever, until he calms down.

“I wasn’t going to,” Patty says, and thankfully she doesn’t sound like she’s offended. “Just – I really appreciate you telling me. It clearly wasn’t easy.”

Richie snorts, and if the sound it a little wet, a little choked, no one comments. Patty keeps nibbling at her toast, and Stan shifts his weight from foot to foot for a moment before pausing to look carefully at Richie. Richie watches the decision to change the subject being made.

“Don’t you have a slot at the station this morning?”

Richie shakes his head and immediately regrets it.

“Nah, Jack and Sammy have the morning slot, I’m not in until two today.”

Stan frowns harder.

“I thought you were covering for Lily this week?”

“Only on Thursday and Friday,” Richie waves a dismissive hand, and doesn’t notice the identical wide-eyed stares being sent his way.

“Rich, what day do you think it is?” Stan asks. He sounds like he can’t decide if he wants to scream or laugh. Or scream with laughter. Richie can’t help but feel like this is a trick question; his heart sinks as he glances between them, and then the calendar on the wall that Stan meticulously crosses off every day.

_Shit._

“Shit!”

It’s nine-fifteen now. He can just about make it in time, if he leaves in the next two minutes. No time for panicking.

“Good luck with your test, I love you, make good choices, I want to be your best man, calling it now,” Richie says in one breath, planting a solid kiss on Stan’s forehead, to his absolute disgust. He sprints to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and laments the fact that he doesn’t have time to shower. He still feels off-kilter, and there’s a large part of him that wants nothing more than to call in sick; to curl up in bed and come to terms with everything the morning had thrown at him already. But he can’t afford to do that, just like he can’t afford to spend too long staring at the mirror, at the bags under his eyes and the big, dumb grin that keeps threatening. He’d done it. He’d actually _told_ someone, with his words and everything, and the worst that had happened was he threw up, which was a pretty typical Thursday anyway.

Richie doesn’t think he’ll be telling anyone else anytime soon; he isn’t going to be shouting about it from the rooftops, or calling his parents with the good news, but still. He feels…

Shit.

He feels good.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things - the mugging story comes from the excellent stand up of Rhys Nicholson, who I thoroughly recommend you go look up now. Because, I know we all agree that Richie's own comedy would be in the vein of a gay John Mulaney, but there would definitely be some of this guys stuff in there as well, he's hilarious
> 
> This chapter came from my headcanon that the bond the losers share results in them literally starting to share fears, to varying degrees, especially when they can't remember exactly which of them is scared of what because of which trauma. Also, this is literally the same length as the previous two combined because I have no self control, happy holidays! It's nearly two in the morning so I've probably overlooked some serious errors, please tell me if so
> 
> Still messing around with chapter styles, I'm hoping it will come together for the final chapter, but I guess we'll see

_ A list of fears (incomplete) with no obvious source that are shared by Stan and Richie: compiled by Patricia Blum (Uris) _

_ Blood _

“So I have good news and bad news,” Richie announces as he shoulders open the front door. He stumbles slightly – his head is spinning and he barely makes it to the kitchen in time to fall into one of the chairs. He starts to drop his head into his hands, before he remembers.

The rich, meaty smell of whatever Patty has on the stove – she’s a better cook than Richie and Stan combined, which, okay, isn’t hard, but still – is almost enough to overpower the heavy copper stench. Stan hums from the other room, absently, but Richie can hear Patty shuffling around and coming to greet him. He always knew he liked her best.

“Oh yeah? And what’s tha – Oh my _ god_!”

Richie looks up carefully and grins at Patty. He can feel his lip split as he smiles, and his head throbs when he tilts it back. He knows there is blood on his hands, and deliberately doesn't look down.

"Is that _ blood_?" Patty asks, voice thin. Behind her, Stan appears in the doorway, gently nudging her to one side to get a good look at Richie. Richie waves at him unsteadily. 

Yes, is the answer Patty's looking for, yes that most definitely is blood.

"The bad news is, I got mugged," Richie continues brightly. Probably the concussion making him a little loopy. He doesn't remember ever getting a concussion before, but then, maybe that's part of having a concussion. It's not like he has the best track record with memory anyway. Patty steps forward to crouch next to his chair. "But the _ good _ news is, it wasn't a hate crime! Apparently."

"Stan? Honey, could you get the first aid kit, please?" Patty asks, hands fluttering around Richie's head like Stan's little birds. That strikes Richie as particularly funny, and he giggles a little to himself, which does not seem to do anything to calm Patty down.

"Stan!" She says again, just a little sharply when Stan doesn't move. Richie glances up, and takes in Stan's face.

It looks like he's the one that's been bleeding for a good half-hour. His face is ashen as he stares at Richie, mouth open and eyes huge and dark. Richie also thinks they may be a bit wet, but it's hard to tell through the cracks in his glasses.

Neither of them do particularly well with blood. Stan always looks a step away from fainting at the sight, although he has yet to take that final hurdle. Richie mostly just has to fight the urge to vomit. Which is why it is a very good idea to continue not looking at his hands, or in a mirror. He doesn't want to know the extent of the damage.

Stan shakes himself, and manages to stumble to the bathroom, and their bizarrely well-stocked first aid kit. They've never really had to use it before, but Richie's grateful for it now. <strike>Eddie</strike> He always knew it would come in handy one day.

"I really think you should go to a hospital," Patty says, taking his face between narrow hands and twisting it to the side to get a better look at the lump coming up on his temple. "Head wounds can be really serious, Rich."

Richie shrugs uncomfortably.

"Yeah but they also bleed a whole lot. It's not that bad, honest. Not even as bad as the rock - huh. Oh, Stan! Stan's back!"

Still looking a little pasty, eyes firmly trained on the ceiling, Stan moves to kneel next to Patty, and hands over the little green box they keep under the sink. Her thanks are subdued, although she presses a careful kiss to Stan's cheek.

"What rock?" She asks, popping open the box and rifling through. She makes a triumphant little _ aha! _noise when she finds the sterile gauze and neosporin.

"Whuh?" Richie manages, dragging his eyes away from where the scars on Stan's cheeks are standing out vivid purple against his bloodless face.

"You said it's not even as bad as the rock, and then you cut yourself off," Patty says patiently, and Richie is fairly sure at this point she's just talking to keep him distracted so it doesn't hurt as much when she has to start cleaning his face, but it works. It takes most of his energy and focus to sort through what she's saying. His brain fights him for a long minute, before he blinks blearily at her, and grins again. She doesn't look reassured. 

"Don't know," he says. "Forgot again. Hey, Stan! I almost remembered something! I should get more concussions!"

"Oh, by all means," Stan says faintly, still refusing to look at Richie. "If you think it'll help."

"It'll unscramble me," Richie says seriously. "Ground control to Major Toz. Ha! Ground control - 'cause I hit my head on the ground, see?"

"I can't believe people pay to see your material," Patty says. Her voice is dry, but Richie knows the truth. She and Stan come to at least one show a month in support, and laugh all the way through, even at the really old jokes. Besides, it's not like people are just paying to see Richie - he still doesn't have any shows of his own, just short sets interspersed with other mediocre white men trying to be funny. But it is enough that he was able to drop his job at the diner last year, and keep going with just the radio and the comedy gigs.

"They'd get more for their money if you'd heckle me again," Richie says, leaning in and almost toppling head-first off his chair. "Audience participation! Best part."

"I think literally everyone, ever, would disagree with you there," Patty murmurs, tilting his face again now that he's all cleaned up. "Well, I think that's as good as I can get it, but I really don't know anything about concussions, Rich. You _ need _ a hospital."

"What I need is to not be stuck with a massive fucking bill my insurance only _ might _ cover," Richie says. Stan and Patty exchange a glance he can't decipher. "Just let me sleep it off, and poke me occasionally to make sure I'm not in a coma, I'll be fine."

"That's probably not as comforting as you think it is," Stan mutters. But he can look at Richie again - still a little pasty, but sure and steady now. 

Richie holds out his hand, and Stan takes it absently, squeezing his fingers and gently jostling him a few times.

"Damnit, Richie," Stan sighs suddenly, curling over their joined hands. "You're really okay?"

"I really am," Richie says, softening. He bends forward until he's curled over Stan in turn, face pressed against his unruly hair. There's always a moment of panic - instant, sharp, and fleeting - at such open affection. With any man, but Stan especially. Richie thinks it's probably a hang-up from when they were kids, and he'd reached the awkward stage of adolescence where everyone read too much into every little touch. He can't _ remember _ anyone reacting badly, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. He swallows, and pushes it down. It doesn't usually last too long, these days; especially not with Stan. "Ten dollars lighter and a bit spinny, but okay."

Patty stands slowly, stretching up from her crouch, and pulls another chair over to sit beside Richie. She drops a hand on Stan's shoulder, thumb sweeping over the bony curve, and Richie presses his free palm over it in thanks. She offers him a wobbly smile.

"So, what happened? Were you really mugged? Are you going to go to the cops?"

"In order: headbutted the ground, yes, no." Richie shuffles a little on his chair and clears his throat. "They took my wallet, but let's face it, there's more moths than money in that thing. And it was my own fault that I fell, I was a little drunk and freaked out. They were actually surprisingly civil about the whole thing."

"And you aren't going to the cops because…?" 

Richie presses his lips together and swallows hard. It makes a cartoonish _ gulp _ sound, but he doesn't even have it in him to crack a smile at it.

"I'd just come out of G Lounge," Richie says finally. "You think any cop's going to give a shit after I tell 'em that? They'll tell me it's my own fucking fault for - for being a goddamn _ fairy _ or whatever, and that's if I'm _ lucky_. I didn't have my card on me, they literally just got my wallet and a bit of cash, it's _ fine_."

"Richie…" Stan says. He doesn't argue. They both know it's not as bad now as when they were - when they were younger, but Richie has a deep mistrust of adults cops.

"But they didn't attack you?" Patty asks. She leans against Richie and knocks their shoulders gently. Richie shakes his head and immediately regrets it.

"No, no, they even said it was random! Which was nice."

Patty rolls her eyes. 

"Okay for that, I'm going to bed," Stan says. "Patty, you get first poke-duty - shit, wait, no, that's not what I meant."

Richie and Patty are both snickering already, even as Stan throws up his hands in exasperation and storms away.

"Stan, no Stan, I'm sorry, come back! I'd be honoured to let you have the first poke!" Richie calls between giggles. Patty snorts, and bullies him towards his room, where he flops down on his bed on his front, kicking off his shoes and wriggling awkwardly to undo his belt. Patty follows a moment later, and sits herself up against the headboard, one hand settling in his hair. Richie curls on his side, and stares blankly at the worn seams of her jeans.

"Do you think I can work this into my set?" Richie asks eventually. Patty hums, grabbing the battered horror novel from his bedside table and opening it to the first page. It's some new author that's been getting raving reviews for his portrayal of isolation in the face of overwhelming modern fears, or something. Definitely not the kind of thing Richie usually reads, but he'd read this one cover-to-cover. The werewolf had given him nightmares for days. 

Patty likes to read the particularly over-dramatic passages aloud. 

"If you spin it right," she says. "Probably won't make much sense without the context, though."

"I'll try it out tomorrow," Richie decides. "I can whip something up by then."

"Uh, yeah, no, I don't think so," Patty says. "_ You _aren't going anywhere tomorrow. Strictly bed rest."

Richie groans.

"Seriously? Patty, seriously? Am I -"

"Yep," she says, and grins. "Major Toz, you're _ grounded. _"

_ Birds _

Richie’s heart damn near stops when he hears Stan scream.

The flooring in their apartment is still cheap, shitty lino even though they could technically afford better now, and he skids across the hallway in mismatched socks; thuds into the opposite wall and keeps going, carried by momentum and terror.

He has no memories of Stan screaming like this before, but it feels appallingly familiar. He feels _ helpless_, in a way that snatches his breath and every rational thought from his head. 

_ At least Patty isn't here _ is the last rational thought that he has, curling around the back of his mind before he thunders into Stan's room and stops dead. 

Stan has pressed himself tight into the corner of the room, breath coming in unsteady little pants. He's upright, though, and he doesn't immediately bloom hurt, which goes some way to calming Richie's racing heart. His eyes scan the room, and don't immediately catch on anything out of the ordinary beyond the lamp that is now on the floor instead of the bedside table where it should rightfully live. But Stan hasn't moved, his eyes wild. Richie looks around again, and freezes.

A pigeon. There's a goddamn pigeon nestled happily in the comforter piled at the end of Stan's bed. 

It isn't hard to see how the fucking thing got in - the window is thrown wide open in the hopes of tempting a breeze through the room because the AC is on the blink again. The curtains remain stubbornly, mockingly still.

"Um," Richie says, then stalls as he realises that he has no idea how to proceed.

"It flew. Into. My _ head_." Stan snaps at him, and Richie raises his hands peaceably. He's not here to judge; even if Stan's screaming had sort of given him the impression that the pigeon had gone at him with a knife or something.

Really, he's not judging. Or laughing. 

"I thought you _ like _ birds?" Richie asks, swallowing down his giggles until they sit, bubbly and heaving, just below his diaphragm. Stan glares at him, but doesn't make a move to come out of his safe corner.

"From a distance! Not when they fly into my head!" He hisses.

Richie wants to keep laughing, but the look on Stan's face tells him that it would be a supremely bad idea, even by his standards. Also, that's kind of… fair enough. Richie doesn't like it when high speed projectiles are flung at his head. Or flap at it, in this case.

"Okay, okay. So how are we meant to get rid of it?" Richie asks eventually.

"I don't know," Stan groans. "I tried to scare it off but it just walked around! And I don't want to try and pick it up in case it flies at me again. Also I think it's going to shit on the comforter any second now."

"Fuckin' sky rat," Richie agrees sagely and jumps a little when it coos. 

Okay, so maybe he isn't the best at dealing with birds up close either. Sue him. He doesn't like their beady little eyes, or their weird, scaly dinosaur feet. It's not that he's scared of them, per se, because he would like it to go on record that he definitely _ isn't. _

He just… doesn't trust them.

"We could -"

"We aren't waiting for Patty to get home," Stan says, which - yes okay, that was what Richie was going to say, but Stan didn't _ know _ that, how dare he correctly assume that Richie doesn't want to handle this himself. "It's - it's just a pigeon, Rich, we can handle this."

"Right, right, yeah, of course we can, we're grown-ass men," Richie agrees, still eyeing the intruder warily. It coos happily to itself and wiggles down further into the worn fabric - it doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon.

Just in case, Richie moves to cover the door. Bad enough it got into Stan's room; if it made it as far as the kitchen, then he really would flip out, and Richie really doesn't have the energy to deal with that.

"Right, well, the important thing is it's more scared of us than we are of it," Richie says. Stan turns wide eyes on him.

"Oh yes, clearly," he says, making an aborted little gesture towards the thing, which is now merrily ignoring them both. That's what Richie gets for trying to help, he guesses.

"Okay, but what I'm saying is, we can't let it know we're scared. They can smell fear."

"No they can't! They literally can't! Birds have a terrible sense of smell!"

"Okay then, um, we still shouldn't let ourselves be scared of it, y'know, because fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."

"Is that - are you quoting Yoda at me? Right now? Are you serious? What, it's not enough that you made me go watch that film with you, now you have to rub it in my face? Wow, thanks Richie, some friend you are!"

Except that Richie is clearly an excellent friend, because the more worked up Stan gets at him, the less he remembers that he's actually meant to be really freaked out right now. The less freaked out he is, Richie reasons, the better chance they have of actually fixing this mess before Patty gets home.

"Okay, how about this - I get, like, a heavy towel or something, we throw it over the bird so it can't escape, then we can pick it up without it flapping in our faces, and we don't have to even touch it! Sound good? Great, I'll go get a towel, I'll be just a minute -"

"Don't _ leave _ me here with it -"

Three things happen at once: Richie turns towards the door to make a break for the bathroom; Stan lurches forward, out of his corner and across the room; and the pigeon apparently finally decided to start viewing them as a threat, and takes to the air. 

Stan yelps, and ploughs into Richie as he tries to scramble backwards through the door while still watching the bird. After a moment of uncoordinated flailing of limbs that will leave Richie with bruises both literal and metaphorical, they manage to squeeze back into the hall, and slam the door shut behind them.

They are silent, breathing heavily. 

"_ I'm _ not telling Patty," Richie says.

_ Rejection _

It's approximately ass o' clock in the morning when Patty calls him, and she's lucky that he has his volume up high enough to wake him.

(Richie would sooner die than admit that it isn't luck - whenever he and Stan are apart for longer than a couple of days, he has his volume up full blast. He can't help it. The thought of missing a text or call makes him start to panic)

"Tozier’s fire department, you light ‘em, we fight ‘em," Richie mumbles in greeting, having managed to hold his glasses in front of his eyes just long enough to read the caller ID. It’s barely coherent, but Patty knows better than to take offense at his lackluster attitude - for a start, she knows him well, but also, she made the decision to call him at _ ass o' clock in the morning_.

"Rich, what do I do?" She asks, and her voice is tight with fear barely restrained. Richie's eyes fly open, and he jerks upright; one hand presses his phone tight against his face like if he tries hard enough he can squeeze himself through the speakers and out the other side, while the other slaps haphazardly at the lamp beside his bed until he gets lucky and hits the switch.

"Patty? Pats are you okay, what happened, where's Stan, is he okay? I can be there in a couple hours, hang on, I'll just -"

"What? Richie, no it's - we're fine, Stan's fine, he's asleep, I'm outside so I don't wake him up, that's not the point, the point is what do I do?"

"Uh," Richie says, which probably isn't very helpful, but the sudden rush of adrenaline, followed by the immediate realisation that there was no need for the rush of adrenaline has left him hazy, and a little bit shaky. "Whuh?"

He has never heard Patty panic like this - in fact, until this second, he didn't think she was physically capable of it. For all of her occasional impulsiveness and objectively weird decision making, Patty has never seemed phased by much; rolling with the punches is probably the only reason she's managed to make so many weird and impulsive decisions. It's also probably the reason she's managed to not murder Richie in all the years they've lived under the same roof.

"It's… I just… it's stupid. I'm sorry, Richie, it's late, I shouldn't have called, listen, I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

"Oh no, nope, don't you go thinking I'm letting you off that easy, Blum," Richie says. She makes an odd, strangled noise down the line at that - he pauses, filters back through what he just said, and starts to grin to himself. "Oh, sorry, should I start calling you Uris now? Give you a chance to get used to it before you have to change it on all your documents and shit?"

Richie chuckles a little to himself, only for his laughter to die away when he realises that Patty isn't joining in.

"Wait," he says.

"Wait a second," he repeats a moment later when Patty does, in fact, wait. 

"Are you seriously telling me -"

"I'm seriously telling you, he hasn't proposed yet!" Patty groans. 

"But he had it all planned out!" Richie cries, and whoops, that was probably supposed to be a secret. Then again, Patty had figured out that Stan had planned to propose on their week out in the wilds, watching birds and stars, and hiking through some godforsaken forest or other. And more importantly, she knows Stan, who never gets himself into a situation unless he's planned out twenty different ways for it to play out first. 

"Yeah, I figured!" Patty says. "And he's had so many chances, and we're meant to be heading back tomorrow, so I don't get it! What's going on, Richie, have I done something?"

"I mean, that depends. Have you killed anyone? Burned down a town? Decided to become a scientologist? Because honestly, I think Stan would still - well, no, maybe not the scientology -"

Patty cuts him off.

"I'm serious, Richie!"

"So am I! There is nothing, _ nothing _ you could do that would make Stan not want to marry you! He's probably just stuck in his head and freaking himself out about it." Patty grumbles under her breath - there's a rustling sound, like she's shifting around where she stands, or is running agitated hands through her hair. Richie softens - he knows he's right. Stan is gone on Patty, further gone than Richie ever thought it was possible to be for another person. It's adorable and sickening. Richie's been waiting for him to pop the question for years; he's more excited about it than he has been about any of his own short-lived relationships.

Which probably explains why they've all been so short-lived, now that he thinks about it.

He stops thinking about it.

"Well fine, but I'd really like to get him_ out _ of his head long enough to stop freaking out about it, and start proposing, so then he can start freaking out about the wedding."

Richie scoffs.

"Pattina, if you think he hasn't been planning your wedding since the day I brought you home, then you don't know Stan half as well as I thought, and quite frankly, I think that means I get a try. Mother would be so pleased if I brought home an accountant, don't you think?" She giggles down the line, muffled so as not to wake Stan. She can't have gone far from their tent.

Honestly, Richie still can't quite believe that Patty managed to convert Stan into the sort of person who goes camping for fun, and not because he was forced to as a boy scout or whatever. Sure, Stan likes to spend time outside as much as the next guy - more than, if the next guy is Richie - but he's always liked to return to a nice, warm bed at the end of the day. Then again, for Patty, Stan would probably sleep on a bed of poison ivy, which according to Stan, could be any and every plant he sees when not in the city.

“So you know what he’s planning?” She asks once her laughter has died down. Richie grimaces slightly, because although he does technically know what Stan was planning, he also suspects that he’s missed his window of opportunity as they’re meant to be coming back tomorrow. Missed all of his windows of opportunity, given that Stan had crafted multiple plans to allow for any disasters, natural or otherwise.

As someone who has done more than his fair share of self-sabotage in his time, Richie likes to think that he is a bit of an expert on the subject, and he can recognise the symptoms a mile away.

Of course, it also helps that Stan has, on multiple occasions, shaken Richie awake in a state of muted panic over the fact that he was about to _ propose_. 

(_Propose_, Richie, I’ll be getting _ married_, can you believe that I’ll actually get to spend my whole life with her? It has to be perfect, she deserves that much, what do you think of this ring, will she like it, I know how much she likes emeralds, and what if I mess it up, Rich? What - what if she says no?)

As though he and Patty aren’t the sort of couple that make Richie want to believe in fate. As though he doesn’t sometimes feel sick with envy when he watches them together, because Richie can’t remember ever having that, not even close. The closest he has is Stan, who he laughingly calls his platonic soulmate, and who rolls his eyes but never disagrees.

Between Richie and Patty, they know Stan about as well as it is possible to know another human being. They both know - even if Patty’s judgement is slightly clouded right now by her own fear - that Stan’s inability to propose so far isn’t because he’s having second thoughts. It isn’t because he doesn’t want to get married, or because he’s changed his mind about Patty. They’ve been seriously talking about getting married for at least a year now that Richie knows of - possibly longer, even.

Stan is just scared.

It’s ridiculous, of course. Patty is a sure thing, he has nothing to be scared of. And deep down, Richie is pretty sure that he knows that. But it’s the same thing that stops Richie from making the first move when he’s been flirting with someone all evening, the same thing that makes him gather his clothes in the grey dawn and creep out first, the same thing that makes him write down strangers’ phone numbers and then toss the napkin and never call.

Because what if, despite all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he’s wrong? He’s misread the situation, he’s seen things that aren’t there, things that he just really wanted to see. What if he takes that risk, that step, and it all blows up in his face, and at the end of it, he’s left with nothing but scorch marks, and the blazing realisation that he was _ wrong_. It isn’t something he ever would have associated with Stan before; it’s buried so deep in Richie’s mind that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to dig it out, but he’d always thought Stan saw the world so differently to him. That Stan could look at a situation like this, and see the evidence as empirical, irrefutable. That he would be able to calculate a percentage likelihood of the situation backfiring on him, and had decided to go ahead with it when he realised that that just wouldn’t happen.

Richie can’t decide if he’s comforted by the knowledge that Stan is just as bad at going after what he wants as Richie is, or not.

He talks Patty through his revelations quickly, and by her considering little hums, none of it comes as a particular shock to her, which is a relief. She knows her future husband very well, warts and all.

“Okay, but the point is, what do I _ do_?” She asks once he’s done with his rambling. He rubs at his forehead slowly as he turns it over in his mind.

“I mean, it’s not like he’s just going to not ever propose, y’know? If he doesn’t do it this week, he’ll plan something else, some other time. Might be best to let him come to terms with it at his own pace, not rush things, work up the nerve all by himself. He probably feels really fucking bad about dragging it out like this, especially when you guys have been talking about it for a while already. He might just need to take a deep breath and start again. Metaphorically, or whatever. Or…”

He thinks, harder than anyone should be thinking at this time of the morning.

“Or?” Patty prompts after a minute.

“You could try and set up the perfect proposal scenario, somehow,” Richie suggests tentatively. “Although I guess if he’s already missed that many opportunities, he may not go for it, even if it is perfect. Maybe some gentle reassurances? Just in case he’s beating himself up about this. There’ll be other camping trips, because you’re both a couple of freaks who think camping sex is _ fucking in-tents _ \- oh don’t pretend like you didn’t think that was at least a little bit funny, Blum-Uris!”

“I mean, it wasn’t just in the tent,” Patty giggles, and Richie gasps, mock-scandalised, the Voice of the Southern Belle taking hold.

“Why Miss Patricia, I never would have thought it of such a fine-mannered young lady like yourself! For shame!”

“Your room is next door to ours, Richie, I am under no illusions of what you think of my manners,” she says, and almost makes it to the end before cracking up. Richie snorts.

“Thanks for the reminder, it’s been a wonderful week of peace and tranquility, are you sure you can’t stay longer?”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t want to keep you two apart any longer, clearly regular exposure to each other is the only thing that keeps you both functioning and slightly less disastrous,” she says, and it’s lighthearted for all that they both know exactly how true it is. How depressing. “So what do you think? Just give him time?”

“I’m literally the opposite of the type of person you should come to for relationship advice, but honestly, yeah. I think he’ll propose soon, even if it isn’t tomorrow. He’s so fucking excited to marry you, Pats, there’s no way he’ll be able to wait much longer.”

Her sigh is so soft Richie almost doesn’t hear it - breathy and delighted at just the thought. Richie smiles to himself.

“Thanks, Rich. Really, I mean it. We’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

“You got it,” he says, and then just before she can say goodbye, calls down the phone, “and remember! Best man! I called it!” 

Patty laughs and hangs up on him, which is fair enough, really.

(The next day, she bursts through the front door and almost straight into his waiting hug, ring glittering on her finger; because Patty is as Patty does, and apparently what Patty does is wake up next to her boyfriend after a minor panic attack and four hours of sleep, and blurt out a proposal of her own.

Richie’s never seen Stan so happy or in love, and that’s saying something.)

_ Separation _

Richie stares at the ceiling and tells himself that he doesn't need to call Stan. Really. He doesn't. Everything is fine. He hasn't slept in thirty eight hours, and nothing has helped; not a hot bath, not jerking off, not playing the radio on low. His apartment is too quiet, and the noise on the streets isn't the same as he's used to, and it's too hot without the AC but too cold with it, and he's never had to live completely alone before, but - it's fine.

There is absolutely no need to call Stan, especially not at one in the morning for him, which is, like, four in the morning for Stan. And definitely not on a, ha, a_ school night_. 

If nothing else, Patty would not be best pleased. Not that she would ever tell him in so many words - she wouldn't even be upset that he felt the need to call, he doesn't think. She just really doesn't like having to deal with a classroom of rowdy teenagers on less than a full eight hours of sleep, which is fair enough. Richie could sleep for eight years and still not be prepared to deal with a classroom of rowdy teenagers. 

He doesn't need to call Stan - it's barely been two days since they spoke. There's no reason for the creeping dread that's been overtaking him. Stan won't _ forget _ him, or whatever it is he's worrying about. That's the worst of it, he thinks, that he can't even really pinpoint what he's so fucking scared of. They've been apart for longer than this before; sure it wasn't as permanent, and okay, they've never lived away from each other, but isn't that sort of the point of this?

All of this - coming to LA, living alone for the first time, it's long overdue. He's on the wrong side of thirty, and he's been living with his married best friends for years. Stan and Patty have always insisted that they enjoy his company, that they liked having him live with them - and more importantly, liked having him split the rent with them. And it's not that Richie doesn't believe them, because he does, for the most part. Stan has a terrible poker face, for one, and Patty isn't one to beat about the bush with people she doesn't like. 

But Richie is aware that it's a little weird. After all, they all technically earn enough money to be able to support themselves. Stan and Patty are _ married_, and Richie lived with them through the early dating years, the gross, sappy newlywed stage, the recent trying for a baby phase. He should have fled long ago, should have wanted to get out of there as quick as possible. 

Instead, he feels like he's lost something vital - like he's mourning something, except he doesn't quite have a handle on what. It's terrifying; already, it's starting to feel like it's too far away to keep hold of. Everything is slipping through his fingers, and the tighter he tries to cling, the faster it goes. 

It feels too much like trying to remember anything from his childhood.

Which is why he's here, flat on his back on a brand new mattress, on his brand new bed, that came with his brand new apartment, trying to convince himself that calling Stan now would indicate a level of codependence that is, frankly, a bit unhealthy. He's only sort of succeeding.

It's not even that he didn't want to come out to LA, or that he regrets it. He knows it makes sense, career-wise. New York had been pretty good to him, but he's had a few offers for his writing from out here; yeah, technically he probably could do that long-distance, but he figures LA probably has a lot to offer. Besides, Patty and Stan have been planning on moving for a while now as well, to somewhere a bit further south. Richie keeps nearly suggesting they come out here, then biting his tongue at the last second. He wants them to go wherever _ they _ want to go.

Or at least, wherever their careers want them to go. Richie figures accounting and teaching are probably the sorts of jobs that you can find work anywhere, but what does he know about actual adult jobs? 

He's just about given up on the idea of sleep altogether when his phone rings. The sound cuts through the fog of his half-panicked mind like a hot knife through butter, and he flinches away from it for a second before sitting up and fumbling for his glasses.

Stan's name lights up the screen, and his throat closes over, fear and gratitude battling for his attention. He clears his throat a couple of times before answering the phone, trying to make it sound like he’s actually had at least a few minutes of restful sleep.

“Tozier’s crematorium, you ghost ‘em, we roast ‘em.”

"Rich? Oh thank god, Richie, I've never seen him like this, it's… nothing's working, I don't know what else to try, I can't get him to stop panicking."

Richie pauses. Reorients himself.

"Pattygonia? What's going on?"

On the other end of the line, Patty takes a deep breath that audibly shakes.

"Stan had a nightmare, one of his bad ones" she says. 

For as long as they can remember, Stan's nighttime terrors have come with the delightful side dish of sleep paralysis, and he'd often wake up screaming; it usually left him drained and exhausted, unable to get back to sleep, but still so restless in a way that Richie is personally, uncomfortably familiar with. His own dreams - though not always bad, he doesn't think - always have the same effect. But where Richie would have them only a couple of times a month, Stan struggled with them several times a week for years.

By the time Richie announced that he was planning on moving out to the West Coast, they'd dwindled down to barely one every couple of months, and Stan still hadn't told him what they were about. Richie didn't have much to tell about his own dreams; he didn't really remember them well enough to talk them through.

He doesn't think that's the case with Stan, who has always been so cagey about them.

"How bad?" Richie asks briskly. Usually he and Patty like to chat shit for at least twenty minutes before they get anywhere in a conversation, but this really isn't the time for his jackassery. 

Patty gulps a couple of times.

"Worse than I've ever seen," she says; she's equally direct and practical now that Richie's on the same page, if he ignores the way her voice shakes. "I barely managed to wake him up, and I have no long he was like it before I woke up, he's just been muttering since, and nothing I say is getting through to him, I tried the trick about the birds, I tried describing the room he’s in, I tried doing that thing you showed me with his hair but he _ flinched _ Richie, he’s never done that with me before. I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t know how to help him, _please_ tell me you can help him.”

Neither does Richie, is the thing. He’s never seen Stan this bad either, but he has an uncomfortable suspicion that he knows what’s set him off.

“Do you know what he’s muttering about?” Richie asks, twisting the hem of his t-shirt around his fingers. 

“No, it’s quiet, and a lot of it’s nonsense,” she says, and then before Richie has a chance to relax even a little, she adds, “but I heard your name a couple of times.”

That’s what he’d been afraid of.

Richie doesn’t know what Stan dreams about. Most of the time, Richie doesn’t know what _ Richie _ dreams about, which is both an odd comfort, and also utterly infuriating. What he does know is that on the nights he wakes up short of breath - like asthma, <strike>like Eddie</strike> \- he finds himself drifting to stand outside Stan and Patty’s room and listening for the soft snores on the other side of the door until he can get his heart rate back down from _ about to have a heart attack _ to _ just finished some light exercise like a functional adult _. Knowing exactly where Stan is, knowing that he’s safe, that Richie could open the door and wake him up, and see him right there, whole and unharmed - it’s enough to bring him back to himself. He never does open the door, of course; just the knowledge that he could, and that Stan would understand means he can retreat back to his room in peace.

He doesn’t know if it works the other way, if Stan needs that assurance as much as he does. It’s worth a try.

“Can you put me on speaker?” He asks, and there’s a brief crackle from the other end of the line before everything goes a little distant and echoey. He hears Patty murmur to Stan that he’s on the phone, and a click that sounds like she’s put it down beside the bed. Richie squeezes his eyes shut and plasters a smile on his face, because he knows what he sounds like over the phone when he doesn’t do the stupid grin-and-talk. Also, he’s hoping that if he just sounds positive enough, Stan will take a cue from him.

“Stan-the-Man! Long time no talk! Not to be all misery loves company, but I am a little bit happy I’m not the only one still awake at this fucking awful hour, lemme tell you Cali heat is a bitch, like I know I said I wouldn’t be one of _ those _ guys, but I think I’m just going to have to wear flip-flops everywhere, all the time. Twenty-four-seven-flip-flop-fest, you are missing _ out _ Stanielle. I haven’t seen anyone famous yet, either, which is a huge let down, like come _ on_, I - oh, no shit, actually I take it back I saw a turtle today! Like, in real life! In LA! I think he must have been a shellebrity, ha! Get it?”

Richie pauses - on the other end of the line, Stan’s mutterings have stopped, but Richie can hear the ragged, wet edge to the little background noises. A snuffle, a hitch, a sob caught in hands. Stan doesn’t reply, doesn’t even sigh, or chuckle, or do anything else to indicate he may have heard.

“Ooh, tough crowd; I thought that one would be good for some chucks, but I see how it is.”

He doesn’t know how long he talks for - workshopping new jokes for his set with no way to tell if they’re any good or not because his mind is so far removed from whatever it is he’s saying and Stan isn’t giving him any reactions to work with. Not that Stan, with his fucking weird sense of humour, is a useful indicator for whether a joke will land with an audience. He tells Stan about his close encounter with his neighbour’s car, and the fact that he can literally hear his upstairs neighbour pissing when it’s quiet, which then leads to a brief spiral as Richie wonders if _ his _ downstairs neighbour can hear him when he pisses, only to decide that actually, he doesn’t care.

Eventually, though, he hears something change over the line. He doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but he droops forward, suddenly drained.

“Hey there, Stan,” he says softly. Stan doesn’t say anything, but he hums a soft acknowledgement.

Patty had said she’d tried the bird thing; where they give Stan a category, like birds in New York in winter beginning with C, and get him to list as many as he can. It’s often enough to distract Stan from the beginnings of a panic attack, and give him something to focus on. Stan likes lists, and he likes memory games, and puzzles, so it was a tactic Richie had figured out early in their college days.

But it only really works if they catch him early, before he has a chance to descend into the full-blown throes of fear, and half-exhaust himself with the way his mind races in circles.

Once, Richie had picked up one of his fancy bird-watching books, and starting flipping through at random, making as many innuendos about as many of the bird names as he could, until eventually Stan managed to calm himself down enough to be exasperated. Richie had been pretty proud of himself - not just with the idea, but with the fact he didn’t just stick to low-hanging fruit like great tit or woodcock. Stan had thought it was funny too, eventually; Richie is, like, ninety percent certain.

He doesn’t have a book of his own, though, so that’s out now.

“Right, here’s one for you - saw it in New York a couple days before I moved, tiny little thing flapping around and eating bugs. Mostly grey, and a bit of black and white, kind of like mottled, or stripy almost? And it had this, like, super bright yellow spot on its chest, and a bit on its head I think -”

“Yellow rumped warbler - a myrtle.” Stan’s voice is barely a whisper, but it’s still more than he’s heard all night. Richie presses a hand to his eyes as the tension rushes out of him, almost knocking his glasses right off his face. He thinks he can hear Patty’s soft exclamations of relief in the background, but he keeps his hearing tuned to Stan’s voice for now. It’s far too easy to get distracted even when he _ is _ paying attention - no sense in making things harder for himself.

“Richie? You’re okay, aren’t you? You still - you’re not - I mean, you’re okay?” Stan says finally. He sounds like that isn’t really what he’s trying to ask; Richie isn’t sure if he doesn’t have the right words, or if he just doesn’t really want to ask whatever question it is that’s eating at him.

“I’m okay,” he replies, as gently as he can. “You want to talk for a bit, man? About anything?”

“I - no. No, I think I’ll be okay now. Thanks, Rich. Night.”

“G’night, Stan, Compattyriot.”

Richie hangs up, rolls over, and is asleep before his eyes are all the way shut.

_ Clowns _

“Come on, this is the first time we’ve all been together in almost a year! It’ll be fun, and then we can all go for dinner at that Mexican place you like.”

“No.”

“Absolutely not, Patthew.”

“Why not? They’ve got acrobats, and knife-throwers, and -”

“And _ clowns_. We’re not going.”

_ Being known _

Back when he’d first realised that, oh, he was actually getting big enough that pretty soon he’d need some sort of manager or agent to start handling all of the contracts and boring business shit that made him want to bang his head against a brick wall if he thought about it too long, he’d had a minor freak out. 

Look, even then, Richie hadn't been under any sort of illusion. He’d known that he wasn’t the subtlest. At the time, media hadn't quite managed to worm its way into every aspect of modern life yet, and he'd been too small-scale to get papped, like, at all; but he'd known there was a chance that would change. He was getting bigger venues, better crowds, better reviews, and there was talk of auditions, of TV, of writing jobs. Eventually (he hoped) people would start to sit up and pay attention to him, and that's when the real invasions of privacy would start. And Richie, despite the best attempts of his repression and self-hatred (what his therapist would later call internalised homophobia, and Richie would call a pain in the ass but not even the fun kind), was chronically unsubtle. Whatever poor sucker got stuck working with him would have to handle that, some day.

So, he'd started looking for a manager, with a very specific set of criteria in mind. That seemed like a good place to start; if he wound up needing anyone else, a manager would probably be the first person to know, as well as the best to actually find and hire someone for the role.

He'd started putting out feelers, and asked lots of oddly pointed and seemingly unrelated questions; had serious conversations with a few people he'd worked well with in the past that he knew he could trust. Eventually he'd found himself with a shortlist of names to work through.

He'd actually already met Steve a couple of times through mutual acquaintances, although they'd never said more than a brief _ hey man, how are you? _ to one another. 

Steve had seemed pleasant enough then - at least, Richie didn't immediately cross him off the list. He also didn't find himself particularly drawn to the name, but then, life rarely worked out that way in the real world. People

(_most people_)

didn't really feel a strange pull towards one decision or another that couldn't be explained by subconscious pattern recognition and a deep, if unacknowledged, desire to pick one over the other that was already present. Richie had read quite a bit about it at three am when his then-sorta-boyfriend was fast asleep and snoring, psychology textbook left open on the floor where it had fallen victim to their enthusiastic limbs. The human brain is so good at instant pattern recognition that it becomes almost indistinguishable from pure instinct - Richie assumed that his brain sometimes recognised patterns that he couldn't remember, given his weird reactions to all kinds of shit.

But there had been none of that with Steve, no strong pull one way or the other. So, he had got in touch, and arranged a meeting.

Even when Richie met him properly, sat down and discussed at length exactly what he was looking for, asked questions, and answered some of Steve's, there hadn't been a great sense of _ yes, this is right, this is the right decision_. Not like he had with Patty, not like he does sometimes with Stan. He'd just thought that Steve seemed like a nice enough, competent guy, who was probably good at his job and didn't charge extortionate fees.

Then he'd noticed the pictures scattered around his office.

Steve wasn't married as far as Richie could tell, but there were plenty of photos dotted around nonetheless - grinning faces, a group of smiling friends that tugged at something familiar just below his sternum. Two women, fingers interlocked, one pressing a sloppy kiss to the others cheek as they both laughed.

Something in him had unspooled, tension letting go so suddenly it was a miracle he'd stayed upright.

After that, he'd hired Steve more or less on the spot, and so far, Steve hasn't given him reason to regret it.

Which makes the pounding, aching fear in his gut even more ridiculous.

Steve has stuck with him with only slightly above-average complaining. He'd supported Richie when he started trying to write his own material and promptly had a very tiny, miniscule, really quite forgettable breakdown over it. He never presses too hard about Richie's distinct lack of love life, and is generally very good at strong-arming any interviewers that come his way, to make sure they do the same. Richie isn't sure if Steve knows, or at least suspects, but he's grateful nonetheless. And Richie has sat through enough fond rants about Robin and her wife to know that Steve will be fine with him on a personal level.

Professionally? That's a whole other ball game. It's not even a ball game at all, it's not any sort of game; the only thing being played with here is Richie's life, which yeah, probably explains why Richie feels like he's about to start stress-crying all over himself.

But he needs to do this, the same way he'd needed to drop his writer, start coming up with the majority of his own material, and only hire someone to help him polish up the final product. He's spent enough hours frantic on the phone with Stan and Patty, convinced that he's about to ruin himself, to flush his entire fucking career down the toilet, which is where a lot of people would say it always belonged anyway.

To their credit, Stan and Pats never try to convince him one way or the other. This is his decision, and they can't make it for him, but whatever he chooses to do, they'll be right there with him; or so they've said at least a hundred times in the last couple months.

And Richie… he tells himself that's all he really needs. He isn't sure if it's true yet or not, but he guesses he'll find out soon enough. He doesn't know what his fans will make of this - if he'll have any fans left, after.

That's a worry for another day, though. First, Steve has to say something.

Steve folds his hands carefully on the desk, and watches Richie squirm for a moment 

"You sure you want to do this -" he starts, and Richie goes cold all over like someone just dunked him in one of those ice baths that athletes all seem to go nuts over. He opens his mouth to start spouting off something approximating his usual shit before he realises that Steve is still talking, "- on TV Rich? There are journalists I'd probably trust more, or even the internet is a viable option, these days. We can do this however you want. And I'm not going to bullshit you, this is going to change things for you, there'll be shows that won't host you any more, and there'll definitely be some places you won't want to go on your tours, at least until everything settles down, but we can figure that out. As long as you're sure this is how you want to proceed, then we can get the ball rolling." 

Richie is so abruptly, blindingly grateful for Steve that he chokes up. Just a little. Barely noticeable, really.

"I mean, it's this or I just blurt it out in my next show," Richie says as casually as he can manage. Steve rolls his eyes, which is fair. He's put up with enough of Richie's shit to have earnt eye-rolling privileges.

"Not a live broadcast," Steve mutters to himself, fumbling around for a piece of paper and starting to take notes for himself. "Definitely something we can review ahead of time, and edit." He deftly ignores Richie's indignant _ hey_! and keeps scribbling. "Is there anything else I need to know? People are going to ask a lot of questions, and I can't promise that you'll like them all. Is there are reason you're coming out now? Are you seeing somebody?"

It's Richie's turn to roll his eyes.

"No, Steve, I'm not seeing anyone, because that would require A, going out into the world and Dos, finding someone that I find attractive, who Part Three, also wants to date me. Do you see how unlikely this sequence of events is, Steve? Do you need me to break it down further for you?"

"Very funny, Rich, you know what I mean."

"Against literally all odds, yes I do, and no, there's no-one in the picture right now. I just thought, you know, if there was ever going to be, in the future, then, well… And I'm sick of it, Steve, I'm sick of people asking me when I'm going to get a girlfriend, get married and pop out two and a half kids and a golden retriever, I'm just - I can't keep it up," then, because he is still fundamentally a thirteen year old at heart, he leers a little and adds, "which, y'know, isn't usually a problem for me."

Steve, who has known Richie long enough now to know that he’s trying to get a rise out of him as an easy-ish out from this _ really fucking uncomfortable _ situation, doesn’t comment on that. Instead, he meets Richie’s eyes with such earnestness that Richie physically can’t look at him without breaking out into a shivery sweat.

Finally, his face breaks into a wide, easy smile, and Richie can suddenly see the kind of heart-throb he must have been in his youth. Not really his type, he doesn’t think, but he gets it.

“Okay then, Rich,” he says. “Gimme a week, I’ll be in touch; yes, that was a dismissal, go on, get out, I’ve already got a shitload on my plate without you staring me down all afternoon with that whatever-you’re-doing with your face right now, scram.”

Richie gets up and scrams.

“Oh, and, uh, Rich?"

Caught in the doorway, Richie resists the urge to flee Steve's Sincere Voice.

"Uh, yeah, bossman? Did you need anything else?"

Steve shakes his head, and smiles a little ruefully.

"Nah, I just wanted to say, I'm so fucking proud of you, man. As your manager _ and _ as your friend."

Richie snorts, because that's what he knows how to do; but clearly some of Patty's self-care monologues filtered through his caffeine deprived mind from her early-morning check-ins, because he doesn't argue. Doesn't toss the compliment, such as it is, back in Steve's face. Instead, he just wiggles his head in the most awkward half-nod that has probably ever or will ever exist, and ducks out of the room before Steve can think of some other Hallmark sappy bullshit to throw at him.

Richie really doesn't think it could have gone any better.

_ Going home _

Richie’s stage fright is an unpredictable beast. He’s been standing up in front of crowds of varying sizes and letting his mouth run away with him in the hopes that someone, somewhere in the audience, will find him funny for the better part of twenty years now, and he still gets nervous. Not that all nerves are created equal, of course, and the big sell-out shows usually aren’t too bad.

Which seems like it should be a contradiction, but staring out at that many faces, all shadowed by the blinding stage-lights, kind of makes him forget that they’re all actual people. Real people, with lives, and jobs, and families, and relationships, that might find him funny but also might not. It’s the same way he can’t conceptualise really big numbers in his head, or picture just how big the universe is; he _ knows_, but it’s meaningless to him. Small shows, shows where he can see every expression on every face, and the audience is close enough to reach out and touch? That’s horrifying, and his hands usually shake through at least the first quarter of his set.

Tonight, though, Richie is on edge, and he can’t really put his finger on why.

He’s mid-tour, so it isn’t opening-night jitters. The material is relatively new, but it also isn’t groundbreaking - it’s been a few years since he came out, and people know what to expect from him. He’ll get the occasional idiot homophobe that somehow missed the many, _ many _ memos, but that’s gotten less and less frequent over the years, so he isn’t really worried about letting his fans down or whatever. At least, no more than any other day. The theatre is pretty nice, even if it does look a bit like a three-tier wedding cake being knocked off a table - lots of glass and pretty lights. Even backstage doesn’t have the weird ingrained-sweat and hairspray smell he’s come to associate with dressing rooms all across America.

Sure, he’s in Georgia, which - historically, okay, not the most liberal of states. But he’d insisted on including Atlanta in his tour dates when Steve asked if he had any requests. It’s only his second big tour since coming out, but he’d done exactly the same last time; this time, Steve had just snorted, rolled his eyes, and said it was the third venue they’d booked.

Stan and Patty are in the audience. He’d got them good seats, _ great _ seats; it should make him less nervous, not more. Even if not another soul out there thinks he’s funny tonight, if just the two of them laugh, it will have been a successful night. Hell, it will have been a successful tour.

Richie sighs, and shrugs into the jacket laid out for him. If he puts it on too far ahead of the show then he'll start to sweat through it with nerves, and he’d rather hold off and sweat through it from the heat of the lights. Still gross, but at least he steps out on stage feeling fresh. It’s surprisingly monochrome for him, and dark enough that the audience probably won’t even see the sweat patches anyway, but that isn’t the point. He’s meant to be heading out for a late dinner and drinks with Stan and Patty after the show, then staying at theirs and flying out in the morning; he has a change of clothes, but he won’t have time to shower, and he doesn’t want to reek all night. They may have had to live with him all through his twenties, but they still didn't deserve to be exposed to that.

His phone flashes with a last-minute text from Patty telling him to break a leg before the audience has to switch their phones off. He grins a little at the echoes of Stan in the wording of the lengthy text; Stan probably turned his phone off before they even got into the theatre, and checked it a dozen times since then to make sure it's definitely off. Richie taps out a quick reply, and moves to turn it off - he keeps his phone in his inside pocket when he's on stage, because he's bound to panic halfway through the show if he can't feel it somewhere on him, and he's lost phones before when he left them backstage - when the screen lights up again.

Someone's phoning him.

The only people that phone him are Stan, Patty, and his manager. Apart from them and the occasional crank call, he only ever gets texts or emails; even for official business. 

He just about has time for all of that to fly through his mind before he registers that the number is from Derry, Maine, and he has to clamp a hand over his mouth. His stomach roils like the few times he's braved a boat to go snorkelling because Patty asked real nice, and he swallows hard a couple of times. Squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to wonder why he's suddenly got the adrenaline shakes.

Really, he should ignore it. Should let it ring out, switch off his phone, and head to the side of the stage, where Steve is probably already frothing at the mouth impatiently for him. If it's important, he reasons, they'll leave a message, or call back later.

His thumb hovers over reject, and then hovers over answer when his stomach swoops and nose dives. 

He has a show in less than ten minutes. He needs to… he needs to…

Richie answers the phone before he can think about it.

_ Hey Richie. It's Mike, Mike Hanlon. From Derry. _

Mike-Mike Hanlon from Derry, hey, how are ya? Listen, I'm sorry, took me a moment to place you, and I'd love to catch up, really would, but I've got a show, I gotta be on stage in t-minus ten, let me give you a call back and we'll -

_ No, Richie, I'm sorry, I - listen, man, you made a promise. We all did. You've got to come back. _

All? Back?

_ All of us from that summer. We all swore. I - Richie, when you left, you and Stan, Uris, you left together, do you… I mean, are you still in touch? I can't get hold of him, Rich, I'm worried. _

I - yeah. Yeah, I am. I - we -

And then he'd hung up just in time to throw himself out the fire door and vomit over the side. Even now, sat inside with his head hanging between his knees at Steve's insistence, his stomach is churning away at whatever acid is left in there. Steve hadn't let him go out on stage; said it had been years since he'd seen Richie like this, and that he'd call an ambulance on his damn fool ass if he didn't sit down, drink some water, and take some deep breaths. Which Richie didn't really think was fair, given the last time Steve had seen him like this had been years ago, and the result of more than a few drinks and a couple of pills that probably shouldn't have been mixed together - or taken at all - only Richie would never know, because he never did find out just what they were.

It hadn't been his proudest moment, and Steve knew damn well how much it would sting Richie to hear him even mention it in passing. 

His phone keeps flashing in his shaking hands - he thinks it's Patty trying to call him, but he can hardly read the screen. His vision is blurred. 

Steve pulls his phone from his unresisting grip and replaces it with a half-full glass of water. Probably for the best that he didn't fill it, Richie thinks. He'd just slop it all over himself. He tries to take a sip, realises just how dry his mouth is, and then gulps the rest, before pressing the cool glass to his sweaty forehead. He still feels like he needs to be sick, but more than that, he's scared.

More scared than… than…

More scared than he can ever remember being.

(_You left me! You made me come to Neibolt! You're not my friends! _)

He flinches when a hand lands on his shoulder, and when it doesn't move, he follows it, back up the arm, across the shoulder, up the neck, until he finds Stan's face. His mouth is moving, and it takes a few seconds for his voice to filter through the fog curling in Richie's mind.

"Rich? Richie, talk to me, are you okay? What happened?"

Richie tries to reply, gets as far as opening his mouth, before he has to clamp it shut again. He shakes his head helplessly, and lets Stan crouch in front of him and gently pull the empty glass away. Time skips again, and Stan is suddenly rubbing his thumbs along the inside of Richie's wrists, with Patty stood beside them volleying with Steve. He's so absurdly glad he got them backstage passes so they could come hound him after the show.

"I don't know what happened!" Steve insists, hands flying about wildly as he tries to explain and defend himself from the wrath of Patty. "One minute he was fine, I go to check in with tech, I come back and he's on the phone, and next thing I know he's disappeared outside to blow chunks _ everywhere_, but I swear, he was _ fine _ right up until then!"

"Richie?" Stan asks softly. Richie stares at him, and stares, and then stares some more. He feels like he's drowning. He stares at Stan, and sees his face in double, a hazy mirage layered over Stan's face with the same serious eyes and wry set to his mouth. His hair's a little lighter, and a little longer, but it's still _ Stan_. Young, and round-cheeked, and then he's gone, and it's just Stan again, the Stan he sees once a week when Patty facetimes him.

He knew that Stan too, though, he's sure of it. Remembers him in the same vague, almost-way he remembers Mike.

"Have you checked your phone?" Richie croaks. Stan shoots him a bewildered glance and shakes his head. Richie's breath gusts out of him all at once; he drops his head back down and tries to get his trembling hands back under control. He doesn't understand why he's so affected by this. He barely even remembers Mike beyond the blurriest of impressions - early mornings in the cold air before dawn, late nights surrounded by books, a sweet and gentle smile that Richie loved to tease wider and wider into full-blown laughter.

“I left it at home,” Stan says slowly. “I knew Patty would have hers so I didn't bother to bring it. Why? Richie what's going on?"

Richie laughs, hollow and humourless. Great question, Stan the man. What the fuck _ is _ going on? He'd quite like to know the answer to that himself.

"You, uh. You'll have a couple of missed calls," Richie says, because for some reason the words _ Mike Hanlon from Derry called, do you remember him? Does that name mean as much and as little to you as it does to me? Because I barely remember the guy and I feel like the world is ending _ get stuck somewhere behind his soft palate.

Stan's brow furrows as he rocks back on his heels to take Richie's expression in. 

“What? Did you try to call me? Why didn’t you call Patty, you were texting her before the show, you know she’d have answered, I don’t -”

Patty’s voice carries clear over whatever Stan was trying to say, and it takes Richie a moment to realise that the phone in her hands is _ his_. She knows his passcode, of course, he’s used the same one

_ (0903, he’s never known why, but it feels bigger now than it ever has) _

for everything for as long as she’s known him. Privacy amongst the three of them somewhat dissolved in the early years when they were still crammed in an apartment that could be called two bedroom only if one was feeling extremely generous, which Richie generally wasn't. Besides, Patty only occasionally steals his phone, and only very rarely to take embarrassing photos of him asleep with his mouth hanging open. 

Usually, Richie doesn’t care if she steals his phone. Usually, Richie doesn’t have to worry about her scrolling back through his recent calls and hitting redial.

“Yes, hi, hello Mike Hanlon, nice to meet you, _ what the fuck did you say to Richie? _”

Richie tries to reach out and make grabby hands at his phone, which doesn’t really work, because Stan still has ahold of them. Except his grip is tighter now, squeezing, crushing; white knuckled around Richie’s fingers. It’s a good thing, he reflects in the back part of his brain that is still ticking over and processing information at a normal speed, that Stan has a cushy desk job; otherwise Richie’s fingers would be paste by now. _ Mike? _ Richie sees him mouth to himself.

He wants to scream - wants to smack the phone out of Patty’s hands even if it does land him with a phone that’s more crack than glass. Wants to tell her to hang up, to hang up _ now _ before it’s too late. He doesn’t know why that’s the specific fear that comes over him - that it’ll be too late, that something will happen that will push them too far over the edge, that they won’t be able to come back from. 

Stan seems to feel it too, though, from the way the colour has leached from his face.

_ Ha, leached, leach, leeches, always used to say there were leeches in the quarry, used to really freak Stan out, Stan and - _

"It doesn't matter who _ I _ am, what matters is who _ you _ are, and why you're calling my friend! What did you say to him?"

Stan clears his throat; he lets go of Richie and stands slowly. Patty glances over at him with her brows lifted as she listens and _ mhm_s along to whatever it is Mike's saying. She does not sound impressed.

"Babylove," Stan murmurs, holding out a hand for the phone; her expression softens almost imperceptibly. Steve looks between the three of them, raises his hands in something like surrender, and ducks out. Richie doesn't blame him - he'd quite like to duck out of this whole evening, please and thank you. Wake up tomorrow and find that time had continued marching on as it always does, instead of this warped stretch-and-twist it seems to be doing now. Patty _ mhm_s again, and then cuts off the murmur of Mike's voice from the other end of the line.

"I'm going to hand you over, my husband wants to talk to you; do _ not _ break him like you did Rich, y'hear?"

When Stan presses the phone to his ear, his hand is shaking, and the other creeps up to the side of his face to tug on a lock of hair like Richie hasn't seen him do for years. He tugs a couple of times, and then splays his hand across the side of his face, neatly covering every little round scar on that side.

Or - not covering. Protecting.

Richie shakes the thought away.

Like so much of their childhood, neither of them remember how Stan got the scars, and it had always awakened such a yawning pit of _ something _ in Richie's chest that he'd never really pushed himself to try and figure it out. Stan, on the rare occasions he was asked about it, always went very quiet and a little pinched around the eyes, and avoided the questions at all costs.

Patty had asked once; Richie had seen the look creeping up Stan's face and had leapt in 

_ (I took him with me for moral support and solidarity or whatever when I wanted to get my ears pierced, but the idiot kept moving every time they came at him with the needle) _

with his usual bullshit before it had a chance to settle there. Patty had laughed, Stan had managed a small smile in his direction, and she hadn't asked again.

Richie knows, suddenly, that he really, really doesn't want to remember where they came from.

"Mike? It's Stan."

There’s a pause as Stan listens to Mike; how did Richie ever think Stan doesn’t have a poker face? He’s completely expressionless now, the only giveaway that anything is wrong in the way his breath shudders.

“Yeah, he’s okay, he’s here, it was just, just um. A shock. How - how long has it been?” Stan asks, like he’s just catching up with an old friend he bumped into on the street. The forced casualness in voice is painful to listen to - Patty exchanges a look with Richie, her eyes wide. Richie really wishes he could explain what’s going on to her, but he barely knows himself. There’s something very deliberate in the way Stan is speaking though, something that leaves Richie even more on edge than before.

"Twenty seven years," he murmurs, voice faint, and Richie… reacts to that. He doesn't really know what his body is trying to do, but he knows it isn't good. He feels flushed, feverish, except for the fact that he's also freezing. Maybe he makes some sort of noise, or maybe he doesn't, but either way, he feels like he's just been punched in the face. Or hit in the head with a rock. Very similar feelings, really. 

Stan staggers over to Richie's side, and falls into the chair next to him. He's let go of his face now, and is just… staring at his hand. Laid flat on his knee, the scar across his palm stands out in stark relief.

Without really thinking about it, Richie turns his own hand over to stare at the matching scar across his own palm. They're about as identical as scars can be. 

He reaches over Stan's lap to grasp his hand, pressing the raised lines of silvery skin together. For a moment, Stan's hand is limp in his grip - then his fingers curl gradually around Richie's, bouncing slightly when Richie's knee starts to jiggle out of his conscious control. Stan swallows hard enough that Richie can hear the click of his dry throat.

"It's back. Isn't It?" He whispers, tears spilling over his cheeks.

Richie folds forward, the words a punch to the gut. His head is splitting open - that's the only explanation for the dazzling pain behind his eyes, for the way half-memories flit across his mind before spilling out again, out of reach. Beside him, Stan is gasping, pressing closer to Richie, a burning line from shoulder to knee. He tries to imagine how they must look right now, what Patty must be seeing, and decides that actually, he really doesn't want to know.

_ It's back. _ Richie doesn't even know what that _ means_, only that he's terrified. Stan must remember more than he does, but Richie gets the feeling he isn't going to be talking about it.

"Have you, um, have you told the others?" Stan asks. Others - right. Of course. Richie can almost picture Mike’s face, thinks of the three of them towards the end of high school, is pretty sure he remembers crying when they had to leave Mike behind, when they drove away in Stan’s old car. He thinks he’d cried, and whooped with joy, and couldn’t remember Mike’s surname by the time they crossed the state line. He can almost remember the three of them, but now that Stan mentions it, he’s sure there were more. A whole group of them; the lucky seven. 

Richie unfurls slowly from his slump, just far enough to lean his forehead against Stan's shoulder - it's unclear which of them he's trying to comfort, but Stan tilts his head to rest on Richie's nonetheless. Patty is watching them both, eyes flicking uncertainly back and forth. Her mouth flattens at the look on Stan's face.

"When, when, uh, has something - I mean, how soon do -"

He pauses, and his face falls further at whatever Mike says.

"Right. Right, I, um, I have some things I'll need to, to take care of, um, I… yeah. Me and Richie, right. Yeah. You too."

Stan hangs up and stares at Richie's phone for a minute that might well stretch out into an hour for all Richie knows. He's never had the best internal clock anyway, and right now it's blaring alarms at him just like everything else. Across the room, Patty flings the door open and has a hissed conversation with Steve that seems to mostly consist of her pointing at them and then jabbing her finger at Steve's chest while sneaking furtive glances over her shoulder. Richie doesn't acknowledge that he can see her doing this.

"So," Richie says, and his voice is jarring against the vague ringing in his ears. "Derry, huh?" Stan flinches; Richie stares at their still joined hands and considers what little he knows.

“We have to go back, don’t we,” he whispers. It feels like giving in. It feels like the first real decision he’s made in years. It isn’t a question, but Stan shakes his head anyway. Disbelieving, refusing, desperate.

Patty - _ when did she finish with Steve? _ \- storms over, takes Richie’s phone from Stan, and tucks into her own pocket. Briefly, Richie considers protesting, but honestly, it’s probably safer with her for now. He still hasn’t managed to stop his legs bouncing. She rubs a gentle hand across the curve of Richie’s shoulder, before cradling Stan’s face in both hands, bending down to look him in the eye.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, love, you know that,” she says when she’s certain that Stan is looking at her. “_Either _ of you,” she adds after a moment. 

“I can’t,” Stan says, and it’s barely a breath. “I know we promised, but I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t, I -”

Not knowing what else to do, Richie squeezes Stan’s hand again, and presses himself somehow closer. Stan reaches out with his free hand to curl in Patty’s shirt, anchoring her in place. Or maybe anchoring Stan to her, like he’s worried he’s about to float away.

Richie swallows back bile.

“Okay, it’s okay, there’s nothing to be sorry for,” Patty murmurs to him. “We’ll go home, I can order us pizza, I spoke to your manager Richie, he’s not expecting you to go back out there, we’ll have a nice evening in. Whatever’s going on, I promise it’ll seem better in the morning, we can sit down and talk it out if you feel up to it, honey, it’s okay.”

Stan sobs, once, harsh and unrestrained.

“No,” he gasps. “No, I have to, I have to go, but I can’t, I _ can’t_, Richie, god, Richie I’m _ sorry_, I -”

“Hey,” Richie says. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay. Not going anywhere without you, Stan-the-Man.” At that, Stan just shakes even harder. “Stan, I’m serious. I only just remembered I even grew up there, we don’t owe that place shit. Actually, y’know what, that place owes us, like, so many hours of our lives spent in therapy, Jesus, I don’t know what I was repressing but It was pretty fucking enormous, clearly, and from the way I’m fairly sure we hightailed it out of there, we were never in a hurry to go back. I don’t fuckin’ care what sort of stupid promise teenage Richie made, because I’m sure he was an idiot. If you don’t want to go, then we won’t go. I’m not leaving you now, Stanny, you’ll have to try harder than that.”

“You don’t understand, Richie, if we _ can _ go but we don’t, if we just choose not to, It’ll… It’ll -”

Richie shrugs slightly, jostling Stan as he does.

“So we’ll go,” he says, because if he pretends that anything about this situation is that simple, then maybe it will be. The power of positive thinking, or whatever. Very carefully, he doesn’t consider why the words taste so foul in his mouth. “There’s got to be a redeye, it’s only, what, four, five hours? We’ll go to yours, have dinner, grab our bags, and go.”

He doesn’t know why he’s saying any of this, not when he so desperately doesn’t want to go. He waits for Stan to argue, to say that they can’t, that _ he _ can’t go; Richie will sigh dramatically, will pretend like he’s staying behind for Stan’s benefit, will agree that it’s a shame but it’s for the best, and will sink happily into the warm pit of relief in his stomach.

Except Stan doesn’t say any of those things. Just sits, and shakes. Patty meanwhile, has taken out her own phone, and is tapping away at lightning speed.

“I’ve already told Steve that the call was about a close family friend that’s in hospital, you don’t know how bad yet, he’s going to release a statement asking for privacy during this difficult time or something, you have at least a week before he starts hounding you,” she says distractedly, because Patty is nothing if not ruthlessly, terrifyingly efficient when she actually puts her mind to it. And impulsive, but years of fielding her own nature has taught her to turn it to her advantage. She’s the master of wild and somehow vaguely plausible cover-stories, and last-minute everything.

Richie has a really bad feeling about whatever it is she’s looking up.

“If you do decide to go, there’s a flight leaving just gone midnight, should get in around five, then it’s a couple hours drive to Derry, there’s no direct flight to Derry county airport, and it’ll be quicker to drive than wait around for the next domestic. And there’s an inn with vacancies still available.” She looks up at Stan, who is staring at her like he’s never seen her before, and also like he’s known her all his life.

Which, Richie supposes, he very nearly has. All of the life he can remember, at any rate.

“You’ll have to use up some of that holiday you’ve been saving of course - you’re lucky it’s summer, it’d be a nightmare if I had to call in playing sick.”

“No, no, Patty, babylove, no, you can’t, not to Derry, you can’t, I need you here, you, you have to be -” Stan, who had finally seemed to be settling, now looks on the verge of panic, and Richie can’t say he blames him. The thought of Patty setting foot in that town is almost enough to set _ him _ hyperventilating, and she isn’t his wife. 

But Richie isn’t hyperventilating; he’s looking at Patty, and he knows from the set of her brow that it’s a lost cause. She’s going wherever Stan goes; whether that is just back to their house for drinks, pizza, and card games, or to a small town in Maine that Richie is starting to suspect is a big part of the reason he still wakes up screaming at least twice a month.

"Fine, but if I'm not going, then neither are you," she says, like it's final. It is, Richie knows. They can argue until they're blue in the face, and Patty will wait them out them a patience born of willingly dealing with snot-nosed adolescents for years on little more than minimum wage. And once she's waited them out, she'll curse them out with a vengeance born of willingly dealing with snot-nosed adolescents for years on little more than minimum wage. Richie quits while he's ahead.

Despite his clear unwillingness, so does Stan. Almost.

"You don't know what it's like there, what will happen," he murmurs; Patty smoothes a hand across his cheek, and he twists his head to press a careful kiss to her palm.

"By the sound of things, neither do you," she says. "But whatever happens, I'll be right there with you."

"Where the fuck does that leave me?" Richie grumbles, but it's half-hearted at best because he never did meet an awkward situation that he couldn't make worse. Stan laughs a little at him, though, which is all he really needed; Patty shakes her head despairingly, but when he glances at her, there's gratitude in her eyes. Worry, too, of course - she'd have to be an idiot if she wasn't worried after all this, and Patricia Blum Uris ain't no idiot. 

"I don't know, don't you have a PA to arrange that for you?" Patty asks, syrupy-sweet and barely curbing her wicked smile. Politely, Richie acts like he can't see it trembling. Between them, Stan is starting to relax in spite of himself at their back-and-forth. Richie really doesn't know how they all managed to live together so long. He doesn't know how he ever managed to bring himself to move out.

"Look, I don't know how rich you think I am, but I only have people to organise my career. Anything else, and I'm on my own."

"That does explain a lot," Stan says, his voice a faint imitation of its usual dryness. 

"Look, I know it's completely called for, but rude," Richie says.

Patty chuckles, and takes Stan's hands to haul him to his feet. From where he's sat, Richie takes a moment to openly stare at them; at the thoughtlessly affectionate way Stan leans into Patty's space, soaking up her love and steadying himself against her side. Richie's heart aches, something yawning wide, and fiercely envious. Years of feeling something vaguely absent when he stretched his mind back bursts suddenly; sweeps over him and presses from every side.

He can't put a name to it yet, but there's a shape starting to form.

"Dinner first," Patty says. "I'll book the flight, and the rooms. We can worry about the rest later. C'mon, Rich."

Richie stares at them, and stands on unsteady legs. Stan catches his eye, and manages a wobbly smile in his direction. Richie stumbles on his way over to them; he barely catches himself, and smoothes it over by slinging an arm around Stan's shoulder.

"Ooh, dinner first? Patty, you tease! Don't even bother with two rooms, you _ know _ we only need one _ ," _ he coos. It's easy, it's a role he's worn so many times for so long that he slips back into it without thinking, a lascivious smirk curling as he wiggles his brows at Stan. It isn't quite enough to completely tamp down the panic, but it's plenty to get Patty sniggering at him, and Stan making a disgusted noise in the back of his throat to mask the fact that he thinks Richie is hilarious.

"Beep beep, Richie."

Oh fuck, yeah, that was a thing, wasn't it? His mouth snaps shut, apparently of its own accord or muscle memory or some shit, and he spares a moment to glare over at Stan. He hadn't missed that shit.

(Yes. He had.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I change Steve the manager from a canon character into Steve from Stranger Things because it entertained me? Why yes, yes I did. There's a version of this universe where Steve Harrington realises something is going on with his favourite client and follows him to Derry where he gets fucked up by Bowers but fares surprisingly well against the killer clown from outer space, in true Steve Harrington fashion. Unfortunately, this is not that version
> 
> Come shout at me on tumblr because I love you all very much; I am theaceace


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh wow would you look at that the chapter count went up wow how did that happen so mysterious

Richie is forty, and heartburn is an old friend of his these days, but this is fucking ridiculous. He rubs at his chest and leans as far back in the hard plastic of the airport chair as he can. Next to him, Patty scrolls idly through the apps on her phone - the news, then Facebook, then her messages, then Twitter, then sudoku; she doesn’t stay on any one of them for longer than a couple of minutes at a time. The clock on the board ticks over another minute, and Richie stares blankly as their flight jumps up two spaces. Still doesn’t say which gate they need, though. He lets his head roll back so that he can stare blankly at the ceiling, instead. It’s about as interesting as the board. 

There’s something about airports that really grates at him. Something about the way everyone else always seems to know where they’re going, and what it is they’re meant to be doing, while Richie spends his time trying to figure out how everyone knew which gate was theirs before him, or which screwed up bit of paper the staff needed to see this time around, or why the app on his phone suddenly decided now is the best time to go on the fritz. You’d think that, after forty years on the planet and all the cross-country flights he’d taken in the last ten of them, he might have got the hang of this by now but you’d be wrong. Mostly he just grits his teeth, follows the crowd, and schools his face into an unimpressed neutrality. _ Nothing to see here folks, do this all the time, I absolutely know what I’m doing _.

It’s probably a metaphor for something, but English was always one of Richie’s worst subjects.

Huh. That’s right. English was one of his worst subjects.

He’d forgotten that.

It’s strange, he muses, given how much of his job these days is based around writing and shit, but he’d just never managed to work up any interest for the books they were made to read for class assignments. That, and his teachers would struggle to make their way through his rambling and erratic essays; usually the points he made, while supported, had nothing to do with what he’d been asked. So, he’d put in as little effort as he could get away with while still passing the class well enough for college, and called it a day.

Stan had despaired of him, grumbling that it wasn’t fair how little he had to try when it came to exams. And Mike had always been happy to proof-read his essays for him, and drag him back to his original topic.

Something cold presses against his cheek, and he almost leaps out of his skin. He glares up at Stan, who had crept up behind him with their drinks and meets his eyes unrepentantly. Richie takes his drink with a small nod of gratitude.

Stan winces when he starts to slurp at the straw obnoxiously loud, but doesn't say anything. Patty, on the other hand, tears her gaze away from her phone long enough to grimace at him and mutter, "really, Richie?"

He releases the straw from between his teeth with an exaggerated _ ahhhh! _

"Yes really. How is my milkshake supposed to bring boys to the yard if they can't hear its sweet siren call, huh Patricia?"

They all chuckle a little, but it's half-hearted at best and they fall silent a moment later. Richie doesn't know what to say, which isn't like him at all and it's making him more than a little uncomfortable, which only seems to glue his mouth shut even harder.

There have been a lot of moments like this tonight. Moments when Richie almost manages to forget just what it is they're doing; when he gets caught up in a joke, or Stan's cautious smile, or the loose curl of hair that's escaped from Patty's ponytail. And briefly, it's like any other time he makes it out to see them; full of warmth, until he remembers that they're on their way to the town he grew up in and can still just barely picture, for reasons he doesn't fully understand.

He drops his head into his hands and groans. What are they _ doing _? What the fuck were they thinking?

It's not too late, he almost says. They aren't there yet - haven't even got on the plane yet. There's still plenty of time to bail; to turn right the fuck around and head back to Stan and Patty's beautiful home. Richie can stay with them for the week Patty bought him while ignoring Steve's increasingly worried voicemails. Their guest room is nicer than some of the hotels he stays in - always perfectly made up with flowers on the table and fresh sheets on the bed. Not like Richie's spare room, which he ostensibly uses as an office but really is stacked high with boxes that haven't been touched in so long that the dust is almost an inch thick.

He's never been much good at tidying up after himself. His room had always looked like a bombsite, and he'd left so much shit lying around the clubhouse that even mild-mannered and sweet-faced Ben had managed to shout at him once.

Oh. Ben.

Richie pulls out his phone and stares down at the little blinking cursor for a moment, racking his brains for Ben's surname. It's right there on the tip of his tongue, he knows. He can practically taste it, it's so close.

"Stan, d'you remember Ben's surname? I want to stalk him."

From somewhere near Richie's shoulder, there's a snort; he doesn't need to look to know that Patty's chewing her lip so that she doesn't openly laugh at him. It shouldn't come as a surprise, though - he's already stalked Mike. Not that there had been much to find; a mostly inactive Facebook, and a few links to the Derry town library, where Mike is apparently the head librarian now. No Twitter or Insta, no other online presence at all, or at least, none that can be dug up with a quick search in the time it takes to Uber from Stan's to the airport.

"Uhh, it began with an H? It was similar to Mike's, I think, Han-something," Stan mutters, rubbing his forehead. He's been quiet, even by Stan's usual, introspective standards. A couple of times, Richie's caught him just… staring blankly at his hands, at the pull and flex of the tendons in his wrists as he slowly opens and clenches his fists. Richie's never put a lot of time into studying his own hands - they're just kind of there, and they're useful for doing stuff, but they're just hands. Broad and a bit hairy, with a fuck-off big scar across one of the palms that he still doesn't remember getting, but sends his heart diving down into the pit of his belly. 

Until now, his mind has always skittered over the scar - he knew it was there, obviously, and he was peripherally aware that he didn't remember getting it. From previous attempts at remembering the name of his high school, or what he did for his twelfth birthday, or any other stupid, inconsequential shit, he knew that actively trying to remember what happened was, at best, a Bad Idea.

At worst, he'd once passed out on the kitchen floor, much to Stan's horror.

This was different - every time he'd glanced at the palm of his hand, his eyes would slide away, something else would crowd at his mind, and although he'd see the scar there, he never got curious about it.

He's fucking curious now.

"Ben Han-something," Richie mutters to himself, pushing aside all thoughts of weird childhood scars - both physical and mental - and focusing on typing "Han-something, Han-something, Hangry? Handkerchief? Handjob? _ Oooh _ , Ben _ Handsome _."

"I think that's actually pretty close," Stan says, and he sounds surprised; like he's forgotten that Richie is a damn genius.

"_ Yeah _ it is, look at this!" Richie exclaims, and holds his phone out for Stan to see. Ben Hanscom: 40 years old, architect with his own firm, and apparently a reincarnated Greek god. Richie's memories of him may be best described as patchy, but the tilt of his smile in the pictures, the way his eyes scrunch up as he laughs obediently for the camera in a recent photoshoot is painfully familiar. That's him alright. Thank you, internet algorithms.

Despite knowing that most of the photos are retouched, and perfectly set up, and only taken when at least five people have had their sticky fingers in his hair and make-up, just looking at Ben makes Richie keenly aware of the inch-thick layer of grease on his hair and skin from airport sweat. Nothing quite like losing the world's shittiest high school reunion to really boost a guys confidence.

Although with Stan here, losing the reunion was always a given.

Patty leans over his shoulder to look too, and makes an appreciative noise in the back of her throat when she sees the pictures.

"I think I saw him on one of those daytime house shows," she says finally, squinting a little at the photo. "He was a guest star or something, he'd designed a gorgeous eco-house out in the woods somewhere." A cheeky glint lights her eye. "Stan, honey, I didn't realise you grew up with such a big star."

Richie snorts; tries to work up the energy to play at offended the way she is angling for, and finds that he can't. He's already exhausted down to his bones; he tucks his phone back into his pocket and shuts his eyes. He trusts that his friends won't let him sleep long enough to miss their flight.

Assuming he manages to get any sleep at all, of course. His dreams feel closer now than they ever have before. He has a horrible feeling that he'll remember them now, and he desperately, _ desperately _ doesn't want to remember.

“How many of us were there?” Richie asks after a moment. He keeps his eyes shut. He needs some sort of distraction.

Stan hesitates, then says, "seven. Lucky seven."

"So me, you, and Ben makes three. Four more, huh," Richie muses slowly. It's like trying to talk around a mouthful of toffee, he thinks - everything slow, and muffled, and barely understandable. Except, y'know, in his brain. Brain toffee. 

Shit, he really is tired.

"And Mike," Stan reminds him gently. Of course - Mike, who is dragging them halfway across the damn country for this. How could Richie possibly forget Mike <strike> again </strike>? "So that's four."

"That's already more friends than I have now, Jesus," Richie mutters.

"Oh, are we counting Jesus as your friend now? Is that how Christianity works?" Patty asks, and yeah it’s low hanging fruit, but Richie feels a giggle bubble up in his chest anyway. Patty’s always been good at making him laugh. When she and Stan team up, he’s been known to laugh hard enough that he falls over.

He loves them. He loves them, he loves them. So much.

It’s terrifying, how much he loves them, and he doesn’t know why. It feels vast, and some of it is formless, reaching out towards a nebulous something, or someones - Ben, and Mike, and three other someones. Richie hadn’t known he could love this much. It breaks over him, leaves him gasping for breath against a tide that is very much threatening to drown him. 

He’s used to the world taking on an odd cast when he’s been alone for too long - that is, without Stan and Patty. How he has to really strain to take anything in, how people’s voices seem muffled and all the colours dimmed. Whenever they reunite something slots back into place, and it’s like… it’s like being at the fucking opticians for the first time in years, when he hadn’t realised just how much his eyes had worsened, and the little lens slots into place in the weird glasses and Richie suddenly realises that oh, he’s been squinting and straining and giving himself headaches for years without realising, and actually there’s a clarity to the edges of the world that he finally doesn’t have to struggle to see.

But, like, emotionally.

Richie makes a note of the extended metaphor on his phone after a moment. He can probably workshop that.

Stan nudges him, and waves up at the board when Richie just grunts. Oh - cool, cool, they know which gate is theirs now, nice. It takes a couple of tries for Richie to lever himself to his feet and lumber after Stan, and the effort leaves him feeling lightheaded; an uncomfortable sensation that doesn’t abate at all during the flight.

Richie barely remembers staggering off the plane and making his way to the baggage claim. He peers through bleary eyed at the carousel until he picks out his duffel - black and boring and practical, if you can ignore the dozen or so vibrant patches Stan sewed on as a joke and Richie unironically loves. There are two people-shaped blurs next to him that he assumes are Stan and Patty, but he can't be sure. Unconsciousness is still clinging on by its sharp fingertips, scrambling his brain and dragging him back as he tries to come to. Not that the flight was long enough, or his seat comfortable enough to sleep properly; he'd dozed just barely on the precipice between wakefulness and sleep, only to jolt back at the last second like he'd plunged headfirst into the quarry in winter, heart racing and mouth gaping as he struggled to breathe.

Over and over. For _ hours _. He probably should have bought the woman sitting next to him some of the finest plane wine on offer as an apology.

Too late now, though; duffel over his shoulder, and one eye squeezed shut against the blinking fluorescent lights, Richie follows the blur of Stan-and-Patty that now seems to have merged into one big blob with joined hands through the airport towards the rental kiosks. The crowd seems to part around them and Richie staggers in their wake, then staggers right into them because he didn't realise they'd stopped until a couple of seconds too late. 

Patty does most of the talking; signs her own name on the rental agreement because Stan still looks far too grey to be trusted to drive anywhere safely, and they'd all learnt their lesson about letting Richie behind the wheel with people in the car to distract him. Stan only seems to come to life when they're led out to pick a car, and Richie and Patty both make a beeline for a beautiful little red number that, in retrospect, probably doesn't have enough space for three adults plus baggage.

(Physical baggage, mostly, but right now Richie thinks his emotional baggage probably deserves a bit of space to stretch out, too.)

Richie doesn't know why he likes to drive too fast in flash cars, really. He doesn't care much for them personally, doesn't know anything about how they work or what's considered good beyond which ones are expensive, and which ones are a nice colour. He can barely change a tyre, and that's only because Stan and Patty had teamed up to bully him into learning. Used to be he'd just assumed it was the sort of thing he'd liked the idea of as a kid; being rich and famous enough to afford a nice mid-life crisis car, and deep enough in his presumed heterosexuality to think it was the kind of thing that straight men cared about. Now, though, he can't help but think that there's more to it - he feels a deep pull when he looks at the sleek lines, not towards the car itself, but definitely towards something. 

(_ Someone? _

_ Will he like it, will he be impressed, he always did love fancy cars- _)

Not that it matters. He throws his duffel into the trunk of some safe, silver, fuel-efficient affront to good taste, and slides into the back seat. Partly so that he can sit himself sideways with his feet up on the seat - ignoring the staccato rattle of statistics in the back of his mind telling him to sit up properly in case they get in an accident, as though Richie has ever sat properly in his goddamn life - and partly so that Stan and Patty can hold hands over the gearshift. Adorable, and completely predictable.

Stan pulls up the sat nav on his phone and punches in the address for the Derry townhouse. To be honest, Richie doesn't think he needs a map to find his way back to the town. Not that he remembers driving any of these roads when they'd finally fled Maine, but because he could probably just follow the intense waves of dread he can feel lapping at him even now. Just figure out where he really doesn't want to go, and then head that way. Easy.

Usually by now, Richie would have started fussing with the radio, leaning obnoxiously past the front seats to reach, or tried to start up a round of ninety-nine-thousand-bottles-of-beer. Today he does neither; instead he tips his head back until his skull rattles against the window almost hard enough to knock loose a couple more memories. Or at least drown out the thick ringing in his ears.

In the front, Patty flicks past a late-night talk radio show, to a classical station, to country, before settling on something playing gentle pop. They listen quietly for a few miles, and Richie almost jumps out of his skin when Stan starts to stab furiously at the buttons at the first whisper of Nena; hitting volume, then mixer, then volume again, until he manages to change the station. Richie feels a shiver ripple up his spine, even through the shaking in his bones from the shitty roads; he’s quietly grateful that Stan continues flipping through until he manages to find something that claims to play _ golden oldies _.

They’re all more than a little offended that most of the songs are ones they can remember being released. But then, it shouldn’t really be a surprise, Richie guesses. They did get kinda old, after all.

Sometimes, Richie feels his age. His joints ache, and if he drinks more than a couple glasses of whiskey he wakes up wishing he'd died in the night, and he feels constantly out of the loop of current social trends and the news in general - which isn't necessarily anything new, but he notices it more now that he runs his own twitter. He feels every one of his forty years pressing down heavy on his shoulders and the place between his eyes where his head starts to ache if he frowns too much; even the years he can't remember.

Now? He feels young, and not in a good way. Not the way people in the midst of a mid-life crisis chase and crave, not the way Instagram hipsters claim to feel when they backpack across the fucking Andes or whatever. He doesn't feel bold, or rejuvenated, or excited for the future.

He feels young like a kid called on for an answer in a class he’s been sleeping through; like a kid with lingering eyes and torn pages from magazines shoved under his mattress, muffled under two comforters and the late hour, and still so fucking ashamed; like a kid who’s so afraid he wants to scream, hollowed out and torn up, and desperate to make as much noise as he can just to prove that he can. Even if no one hears it, even if no one laughs, at least he’ll know he was there. He doesn’t remember feeling like this as a kid, but he knows he must’ve. It feels way too familiar.

Stan’s hand on his is a shock - his eyes flick to the front seat, where Stan is twisted around with a small smile on his face. There’s light beginning to crawl over the horizon - Richie must’ve been out of it for a while. The radio is playing softer now, some dad rock station that must be driving Stan mad. 

Richie squeezes his hand, and rolls his eyes a little.

“I think I remember leaving,” Stan says slowly, and his voice is surprisingly wistful. “You wouldn’t stop hanging out the window.” But then, Richie is wistful for that feeling, too. The memory is barely-formed, even as he focuses on it, but he remembers a fierce joy and pride; bittersweet to point of pain, but so fucking triumphant. It isn’t enough to paper over the fear, but it’s something. They left. They got _ out _.

They left Mike behind.

The feeling sours, curdles in Richie’s chest. His mouth presses into a flat line. Stan, who has always got Richie - and he didn’t need his memories to know that - falls silent. 

Patty glances at him in the rearview mirror, her brow pinched in concern. She still doesn’t really know what’s going on, has even less of a clue what’s happening than Richie, and doesn’t even have the dubious assistance of phantom memory pain. But she’s here, with them, and that means something. It’s got to.

“So,” she says.

  
  
  


_ How did you two really meet, then? _

_ He was the only kid in first grade that let me talk as much as I wanted during recess, and I was the only kid that didn’t make fun of him when he wore his boy scouts uniform non-stop for like three months. We’ve been friends ever since. _

  
  
  


Patty decides to stay at the townhouse when they go for dinner. She’s already found two places that both deliver and definitely have kosher options on the menu, which Richie is actually very impressed by, given the general everything-ness about Derry. He doesn’t know if it’s a testament to the town finally dragging its heels into the twenty first century, or if Patty is just that efficient. Maybe both.

It took them a few hours longer than anticipated to drive up to Derry, partly because Patty wanted to take a scenic route through the state her husband grew up in - although Richie could have told her that there really isn't anything scenic about the Maine boonies unless the scene you're going for is 'horror film' - and partly because they had to keep stopping when a flash of memory took Stan or Richie by surprise. By the time they stopped for lunch, Richie had lost count of the number of times they'd had to pull over so that Stan could sit out against the car, breathing the fresh air, or Richie could dry-heave into the bushes. It was never anything concrete; just moments of childish delight as he leapt into freezing water, the dim light and jaunty music of an arcade, the bubbling excitement of holidays and weekends. A fear, so deep in his chest that his heart pumped it through his veins with every quickened beat.

By the time they arrived, it was late afternoon, and they'd immediately dumped their bags in their rooms - at least, Richie dumped his bag without a second glance. Stan had carefully unpacked all of his and Patty’s toiletries, chargers, and pyjamas; he hadn’t, however, unpacked and hung up all of their clothes in the teeny-tiny wardrobe the way he usually does when travelling, even when he’s only away for a day or two. Richie doesn’t really know what to make of that. Patty, meanwhile, had flopped herself face-down on the bed, and wiggled until she had untucked the covers to her satisfaction, something that still mystified Richie. Not that he gives two shits personally - his sleep is equally disturbed on his own memory foam mattress, or scrunched up in the chair on his balcony - but Stan used to insist on tucking himself into bed so tight that it’s a miracle he never suffocated. 

Richie, in a show of solidarity, had flopped down beside her, and almost crushed his glasses in the process. 

So now he’s rubbing idly at the bridge of his nose as he hangs around the lobby, waiting for Stan to finish matching his cufflinks, or ironing creases into his trousers, or whatever the fuck it is that’s taking so long. Richie loves him, and appreciates that he likes to make good impressions, but these are people that knew Stan when he was going through puberty, and there’s really no coming back from that. Besides, he’ll be stood next to Richie, so whatever happens he’ll look great by comparison and is guaranteed to not be the worst-dressed person in the room.

Not that Richie will say that out loud, because Stan sets his jaw and gets a pinched look around his eyes, and Patty starts loudly talking over him, as though she could out-mouth the trashmouth.

He runs his hand over the worn cushion-covers that are probably older than him, and snags his hangnails against an old, round burn. It’s enough to make his fingers itch for a cigarette, which is weird - he doesn’t usually get cravings so intense these days. He’d been a pretty heavy chain smoker in his early twenties - and, he’s beginning to suspect, through most of his teens - but managed to cut back to strictly social smoking over ten years ago, and hasn’t felt much of an urge to go back to it since. But that burn in the cushion - here in Derry, with so many impressions of memories vying for his attention - it really catches his attention. It isn’t quite as dramatic as the hole Bev left in the hammock when she laughed so hard at Ben that the cigarette fell right out of her mouth, but Richie’s still impressed that it’s still here and hasn’t been replaced -

_ Bev. Holy shit. _

“Holy _ shit _ ,” Richie says. Bev, Beverly, Beverly Hills Cop, Beasterly. God, they’d spent so long one afternoon trading shitty nicknames back and forth until they’d mangled their own names so far past the point of recognition that they’d had to try to reverse-engineer their way back, which had just resulted in them laughing so hard they could barely _ breathe _. Or maybe that was just the sheer amount of smoke that curled around them, sealing them off from the world outside. The clubhouse was many things, but well-ventilated wasn’t one of them.

Bev had been the first of them to leave, he remembers suddenly. Not even a year after that summer. They’d known each other no time at all, but he can recall with startling clarity the way he’d missed her like one of his senses when she was gone. Like she’s taken all of the taste of the world with her, leaving him with nothing but the ashy leftovers of the smokes they’d stolen and then shared. He’d been furious, he thinks, when she stopped writing. Not _ at _ her, exactly. His anger hadn’t been directed anywhere, hadn’t been for anyone but him. He’d placated himself that maybe it was for the best - he doesn’t know why, now, but he thinks there may have been some relief for her, in forgetting them.

But fuck, Richie had missed her. Still misses her. She’d been the first of them to leave, to prove that the world outside of Derry really did exist for a bunch of Losers like them; that one day they could exist outside of Derry, too. How could Richie have ever resented her that?

It had given him a kind of hope, almost.

He takes the stairs two at a time and bursts into Stan's room without bothering with social conventions like knocking or announcing himself, so he probably only has himself to blame when he has to duck the book that is flung his way.

"Beverly!" He exclaims, for once not allowing himself to be distracted.

"No, I'm Patty," she says, eyeing Richie warily. "Did you manage to concuss yourself in the ten minutes you were left unsupervised? Because I have to say, I think that's a new record for you Rich."

"What?" He says, then, "no, no, no, Stan, _ Beverly _! Bev! That's five!"

"Six," Stan says, and when Richie is visibly bemused and counting backwards in his head, he gestures to the book that could have spelled Richie's demise had he been any slower dodging. Frowning, Richie picks it up, scans the cover, and promptly drops it again.

"Big Bill," he murmurs, heart aching fiercely. _ Bill _ , their fearless leader, who he'd always looked to for approval, Bill whose ideas he'd always been so happy to play along with, Bill who he would follow to the ends of the Earth <strike> to the sewers </strike>. "Fuck, I guess that explains why we read so many of his books, even after the first couple endings turned out like shit."

"They never did get better, did they?" Stan asks, and he's smiling a little. "He used to tell ghost stories when we camped out in your yard, and your mom let us use the old barbeque as a fire pit. How was he better at writing endings when we were ten years old?"

"Maybe he forgot them all," Richie says - it's only halfway a joke. Stan's smile fades. He ducks his head and nods.

"That's six out of seven, then," Patty says finally to break the weird tension that's settled over the room. "Not bad considering you didn't have a clue who any of them were two days ago."

"One left," Richie murmurs, squinting a little like he can find the answer printed small on the opposite wall if he just stares hard enough. He hurts, he registers vaguely. His head is pounding the more he tries to focus in on that nebulous seventh figure, and his heart squeezes tight on every beat. Stan shuffles where he stands, but although his face is tight with worry and indecision, he doesn't look like he's suffering the same complaints as Richie. Eventually he shrugs a little, and tugs a cardigan on over his shirt. The ache fades as Richie watches him, washed away by a tidal wave of fondness. He has moments of their childhood now, watching Stan tug at his own clothes until they lay so perfectly that not even Richie's grandmother could have found fault with them, and then very rarely, attempting to do the same to Richie. It never worked out - apparently his talent for completely ruining anything he wears for longer than half an hour is congenital.

"Guess we'll find out soon enough, right?" Richie mutters. It hurts to say. The words are unwieldy in his throat and hard to push past his tongue. Soon enough? It doesn't feel soon enough - he wants to know, he _ needs _ to know. There's someone missing from <strike> him </strike> the group, and <strike> he </strike> they won't be complete until the final piece of the puzzle has slotted in. Stan watches him, mouth pressed into a perfectly straight line, and leads the way down to the car without another word. Richie exchanges a slightly baffled look with Patty before loping after him, calling a goodbye over his shoulder that almost sounds perfectly normal.

Stan doesn't speak on the drive over, and for once, Richie follows suit.

One Stan has parked - perfectly neat and equidistant between the lines, that fucking show-off - Richie puts a hand on the door and stops. He should be getting out. There's nothing stopping him beyond the bone-deep certainty that he doesn't want to be here. But that's not even a new feeling; it settled through his skin and muscle when he was on the phone to Mike and hasn't shifted since. He made it all the way from Atlanta with the weight of it dragging him back, and he can sure as shit open the car door with it curling like ice through his hands and freezing them in place.

He doesn't move.

"Rich?" Stan whispers. Without the purring engine, the car is otherwise silent.

"Yeah?" Richie says, clearing his throat and feeling absurdly like he should be whispering too. Like he doesn't want to be overheard.

Stan hesitates. Richie waits for him.

"I'm scared," he says finally. "I'm so fucking scared, Rich."

_ Of what? _ Richie wants to ask. _ Me too _ , he wants to say. _ Then let's get the fuck going while the going's good _, he doesn't say.

"Yeah," is what he says instead, lamely. Stan turns haunted eyes on him, and Richie knows that he hears everything Richie didn't say. They're both scared, scared fucking witless, although Stan would argue that Richie's never had wits to be scared out of.

Richie can't remember ever being scared quite like this before, and he's starting to remember a whole lot of being scared. There are a thousand little things that send his gut roiling; sensible things to be scared of, like the fact that he's here meeting five people who are essentially strangers to him, and the fact that he's a publicly gay man in the town that would have cheerfully seen him dead for such an offense when he was growing up - and still would, according the article Patty had tried to hide that she was reading from him earlier. He'd looked it up, later; the news hadn't even made it to the rest of the state, never mind the country. A vicous murder like that ought to at least be on the local radio, on TV, or anywhere except the fucking Derry Advertiser; a small memorial piece that said police were following multiple lines of inquiry, and if anyone knew anything, then they should come forward.

Right.

These are perfectly reasonable fears that Richie can acknowledge, even if just to himself. Harder to explain is the way he's been jumping at every shadow since they crossed the city limits, or the way his gaze had skittered away from the statue in the park, or the way he'd had to physically work up the nerve to approach the bathroom sink earlier in the townhouse. It doesn't make sense, and he can barely even think it, never mind admit as much out loud to Stan.

_ Something's rotten in the state of Maine _, he thinks a little hysterically to himself.

"Yeah," he says again, and throws open the car door. He gets out and stands for a minute, hoping that it looks casual and not at all like he's leaning against the car for support against a sudden wave of dizziness and brief spike of pain behind his eyes. There's a pause - a moment of hesitation - before he hears Stan do the same.

Richie blinks away the spotty lights from his vision (like the beginning of a migraine, he thinks, except he's never had migraines before, what a shitty time to start, ugh) and shoves his hands in his pockets to follow Stan over to the restaurant. He can feel the way his shoulders start to creep up towards his ears, forcing him down and in on himself, making him look smaller. As though he can hide from this behind Stan, if he can just curl up little enough.

The thought makes him frown, and he takes a moment to consciously unbend himself. He’s used to taking up too much space, with his gangly long limbs, and his broad shoulders, and his complete ignorance of just what decibel level an ‘inside voice’ ought to be.

He follows Stan into the restaurant, looks up, and 

And

And

Oh.

_ Fuck _.

It hits him like a freight train - like the freight trains Eddie used to watch rumble by on the Saturday mornings that no-one else was out because they were tied up with chores, or sleeping in late. He can’t breathe - Eddie always thought he had asthma, clung to his aspirator like a lifeline, as though Richie hadn’t seen him run a mile at near a dead sprint when Bowers was in a temper and wind up barely out of breath. His heart feels like it’s going to pound right out of his chest - there’s probably at least ten conditions that he’s susceptible to with heart palpitations as a symptom, and Eddie would be able to rattle them all off in order of increasing likelihood.

_ There he is _ , Richie thinks dumbly to himself. _ Lucky seven. _

It’s lucky alright; lucky that none of the three men stood by the table look up as Richie staggers back and bolts for a door that he can only hope leads to the bathrooms. Jesus Christ, fucking shit on a stick, he _ forgot _ Eddie. 

He forgot _ Eddie _. 

And okay, Richie may not really know what’s going on here, or why he’s back in this damned town, or why Mike thought it was a good idea to call them all up out of the blue like this, but he does know that it wasn’t really his fault that he forgot everyone - even Stan, who was barely out of his sight for the first few years after they left. In fact, he’s starting to get the impression that they expected it to happen, that he knew what he was getting into when they crossed the city limits at the end of summer with the windows of Stan’s old car rolled down as far as they’d go. He must have known that he’d forget pretty much everything.

He forgot _ Eddie _. It shouldn’t have been shocking but it is - that Richie could go so long carrying around jagged pieces of himself that he could barely acknowledge never mind recognise, and never once manage to put those pieces together into the shape of someone he’d been looking for all this time.

_ Eddie forgot me first _ , a vindictive little voice hisses at him as he hunkers down over the toilet, gagging. He squashes it fiercely - it wasn’t Eddie’s fault his mom was a raging bitch who only told him they were moving two weeks before it actually happened. Eddie hadn’t _ wanted _ to go, Richie’s sure of that. It isn’t fair of him to, to, what? _ Blame _ Eddie for something that apparently happened to every one of them that managed to get out of this town? Because he doesn’t blame Eddie for it, of course he doesn’t.

Fuck, he just feels so fucking _ stupid _. Teenage-Richie stupid, pre-pubescent-Richie stupid, too loud, and too annoying, and too much, because apparently Richie responds to attention the same way as a poorly-trained puppy, and any attention is good attention, especially when it’s coming from Eddie.

Although this does, at least, explain a few things about his dumpster fire of a love life. He’s always had a soft spot for the short firecrackers, especially the ones that give as good as they get.

Stan’s never going to let him live it down.

Because Stan will notice, of course Stan will notice, even if Richie hadn’t told him all those years ago, which he’s starting to suspect he had. Stan is observant, and patient when it suits him, and he knows Richie better than anyone on the planet. He’ll take one look at Eddie, hear the first word out of Richie’s mouth - which will undoubtedly come across to anyone with half a brain cell as _ trying too hard _\- and will know perfectly well what’s going on here.

_ It’s not too late to leave _ , Richie thinks bleakly, even though he knows now that it is. _ They didn’t see me, I can still hop out this window right here, there’s still time to bail _.

A gentle weight settles between his shoulder blades and rubs careful circles. 

"Shit," Richie whispers, leaning his head against his forearm when he's finally finished retching. It feels like it weighs a hundred pounds all of a sudden, and Richie doesn't really have muscle anywhere, but especially not in his neck, so there's really no way for him to hold up the weight of it. He squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself that he's not going to cry until it becomes true and he doesn't.

"Yeah," Stan agrees quietly, still rubbing his back. "Shit. Eddie?"

"Eddie," Richie grunts into his arm. "Still, fuck it's like some fucking Harry Potter _ always _ bullshit, god, shit."

"Hey," Stan says, mildly reproving. "That's my best friend you're comparing to a creepy guy that got so mad about being rejected he went and joined the wizard far right, and I don't appreciate it. I have better taste than that."

Richie snorts.

"Stanny, let's not get into a discussion about your taste in friends, or just people in general, I knew you in college. It isn't going to end well for you. And before you say anything, yes Patty is the exception that proves the rule, she's a delight and I'm thrilled to know her."

"Nice save," Stan remarks dryly. "Now, are you done with your freak out? Can we please get out of this bathroom, it's really difficult not touching anything in here, and I can't see any signs saying when it was last cleaned or services, which frankly, I'm not okay with."

"Careful." Richie stands up slowly and staggers over to the sink to rinse his mouth out while Stan watches with barely disguised disgust, because yeah, this probably isn't drinking water <strike>grey water</strike>. "You're starting to sound like Eddie, I don't know if I can control myself. My loins are on fire, Stan, I've never been attracted to you until this very moment, but please, tell me about all the potential diseases I could get from the Derry tap water, you know how that shit gets me going."

"Beep beep, Richie," Stan says, and he sounds like Richie's aged him fifty years since they arrived. He rifles around in his adorably practical satchel, and pulls out a packet of mints, offering one to Richie and then claiming another as his own. Then, "wait, _ never _? Richie, that's rude, and also a huge lie. C'mon, Patty used to tell me everything from your girls nights, I know full well -"

Richie, who has been striding away from Stan and trying to stifle his grin, stops listening as he spies two models entering the restaurant, already deep in conversation, and apparently oblivious to the rest of the world.

He recognises the models, although he's only seen recent pictures of one of them, and the other he only remembered less than an hour ago. Seeing them is enough to make him drag a reluctant smile onto his face as he shoves his hands in his pockets.

"Well you two look amazing," he drawls, and the smile widens, turns real as they both jump and spin to face him. "What the fuck happened to me?"

"Richie?" Bev manages, eyes wide and delighted. It's kind of flattering, really, that she looks so happy to see him. She's just as beautiful as he remembers her being, although he hadn't been able to appreciate it at the time. He'd spent so long wishing he had a crush on her, trying so hard to look and see her the way Bill did, the way Ben did, that he hadn't taken enough time to just look at _ her _ . He remembers thinking _ if I can't have a crush on Bev then I guess I'll never have a crush on a girl _, because apparently Richie did have some modicum of self-awareness at thirteen. 

Ben laughs, and god, even his laugh is hot, that's not fair, how do some people get all the luck? He comes in for a bro-hug, complete with the little back-slaps and Richie rolls with it like he doesn't remember Ben fully sitting in his lap once because they hadn't managed to drag enough boxes and cushions down to the clubhouse yet to make a seat for everyone. Only once; afterwards he'd mumbled awkwardly that Richie's legs were too bony, which okay, they probably were, and had resulted in Mike hauling down some old crates that had been laying around the farm. But then, maybe Ben doesn't remember that yet, or maybe he's just not comfortable with that shit now that he's a proper human adult and not whatever muppet-hybrid Richie is.

Or maybe he just isn't comfortable hugging a gay guy. Who knows.

No, Richie isn't being fair to him, he knows he's not being fair. Ben had been just about the sweetest kid he'd ever met, and he never had a bad thing to say about anyone that wasn't Bowers and his gang. He probably just hugs every guy like that now - probably picked it up at fancy architect school.

Richie finishes his very manly chest-bump of a hug, and rounds on Bev, ducking down to reel her in close. She squeezes him like she can't quite believe he's here, and the brush of her hair against his neck is so familiar as to be overwhelming. She'd always liked to rest her head on his shoulder when they ditched class to smoke behind the bike racks.

"Wait, _ Stan _?" Ben asks, and Bev goes rigid in Richie's arms, ripping back just as Ben leans in for a bro-hug with Stan, which at least answers that question. It's always so funny to watch people try to hug Stan, because he always looks so firmly disapproving when it isn't coming from Patty or Richie, and people get so uncomfortable with the fact that he will flat-out refuse. With Ben, though, Stan leans carefully into the contact, his eyes crinkling with guarded but very real joy. 

His expression falters slightly when he turns to face Bev, but he opens his arms anyway, and doesn't even have the decency to look surprised or winded when she throws herself into them. He runs a hand over her hair once, and lasts a few seconds longer than Richie would have thought before he starts to look uncomfortable. When he pulls back and starts to extricate himself, Bev presses a hand to her mouth and looks up at him with shining eyes. Not that she needs to look up too far.

"The same but taller, right?" Stan asks softly, and she nods; a jerky little thing that rattles the tears loose. Richie exchanges an alarmed glance with Ben, but she just scrubs a hand over her cheeks and smiles until the server comes over to lead them to their table.

Richie had already spotted it of course, but he still hangs back slightly, and _ still _ manages to panic more than slightly when he catches sight of Eddie again. And, well, Richie isn't known for making good decisions when he panics, so true to form, he rings the gong loud enough to make everyone jump, before tossing the stick over his shoulder like the heathen he is.

"This reunion of the Losers Club has officially begun!" He crows. Stan shoots him an unimpressed look, but Richie doesn't care, because Eddie is watching him with an aggravated half-smile already blooming. It folds into confusion a second later as his gaze darts over the other three.

"Hey, look at these guys!" Eddie says, and he drags the words out like Richie does sometimes when he has to meet managers and producers that he's sure he's worked with before but absolutely can't place. Unable to resist, Richie does a quick little mime behind Ben's back, because he knows it'll horrify Eddie and also make him smile, which is always the best possible outcome. Out of the corner of his eye, Richie thinks he sees Mike's grin widen to the point that it's got to be uncomfortable, and Bill roll his eyes. He doesn't look over though.

Was he this obvious when he was thirteen? Probably. He must've been insufferable.

Eventually, they settle themselves around the table, and Richie has Stan on one side and Bev on the other. It's a comfortable seating arrangement - low stress. If he sat next to Eddie he'd be so high-strung all evening he'd wind up having a meltdown before the first course. At least now he might make it to dessert.

They order drinks - water for the table, beers, shots, the works. Which works for Richie, who suddenly wants nothing more than to be very, very drunk; drunk like he hasn't been in years. Stan's frown of disapproval when he throws back the first shot and takes several long gulps of his beer is very eloquent, so Richie doesn't look at him. Instead, he toasts along with Bev when she raises her glass, and settles back to listen to her chat to Bill. There are memories, vague and barely-there but becoming clearer as the seconds tick by, of the awful mooning and pining there when they were kids. _ Can't fake that sort of passion, indeed. _

The conversation around the table is light to start; how do you even go about catching up on twenty-something years of a person's life? Richie doesn't really know, but they all seem to be doing an alright job at it. They start with where they'd all gone to college, and Richie realises with a pang that Eddie has been in New York since college. _ Years _ they'd lived in the same city, possibly walking right past each other on the subway, or using the same shops, or holing up in the library at the same time in Eddie and Stan's case, and they'd never known. Richie likes to think that he'd have looked twice at Eddie, that he'd have caught his eye, but honestly with the speed life moved in New York, he may not have. 

Under the table, Stan's knee knocks against his like he knows what's got Richie so down. But if Stan can see it, then there's always a chance, however slight, that one of the other Losers will too, so Richie doubles down on the humour, the less-than-gentle ribbing of everyone.

But college talk leads them to where they all wound up living, which leads, of course, to who they're living with. Bill, naturally, is married to a beautiful actress because he's a big, hotshot author with actual film deals and shit. Apparently they'd met on set at his first film adaptation and the rest, as they say, is history. Richie then thoroughly embarrasses Bill by scrolling through his wife's IMDB page and cackling at some of the early b-movies she'd starred in. Not that Bill seems to mind too much - he laughs along at some of them, murmuring that he didn't even remember half of these, and he should probably try to forget them again quick if he ever wants to be let back in their bed. Richie laughs a bit louder than that deserves so that he doesn't do something stupid like point out the startling resemblance between Audra and Bev, because. Yikes. He does meet Ben's eyes though, and from his expression, he's pretty sure he's not the only one who noticed.

Bev isn't wearing a ring, but there's a pale strip of skin on her finger that suggests it's a recent development. She skims over the subject when Bill asks about the fashion line she and her husband own - and Richie has a moment when he realises that he's _ worn _ some of their designs to awards shows on the occasions he both hired a stylist, and also bothered to give some of his own input. In fact, he'd _ always _ picked Bev's designs when given options. And maybe that should be awkward, or humiliating, but Bev looks so happy when he mentions it that he can't bring himself to feel an ounce of regret.

He doesn't press her about her husband. There aren't many memories of her home life - and Richie isn't sure if that's because she deliberately didn't tell them the worst of it, or if he'd been too wrapped up in his own life and own problems, or if it's just that there are more memories lurking and ready to smack him over the head when he's least expecting it - but what he does remember isn't good. The bruises around her wrists that her sleeves don't quite hide look familiar.

Ben and Mike just shrug and grimace when questions turn towards their love lives, although Richie's sure he doesn't imagine the way Ben's eyes flick to Bev… or the way Mike's flick to Bill. Which is - huh. Interesting.

Are _ any _ of Richie's friends actually straight? Three out of seven is still technically the minority, but that's two more than he'd thought there were for most of his childhood. It's reassuring, and also infuriating. How many nights had he spent sleepless and sick with fear, curled up under the covers and full to bursting with secrets and shame, so sure that if he opened his mouth they'd all come spilling out and by the end of the week it'd be _ his _ body they were pulling out of the Kenduskeag?

Oddly specific, that. Richie squashes the thought before it can choke him.

Except then, he notices the ring on Eddie's finger. Well. He'd noticed it before, but he's very good at compartmentalizing, and he really hasn't wanted to consider the implications. Richie knows he shouldn't be upset at this. It's been more than twenty years since they saw each other - Eddie's lived a whole life that he knows nothing about. Of course he got married - of course someone looked at him and saw all of the same things Richie did, all of the reasons to love him. Saw past the annoying little turd to the even littler, more annoying turd at the centre that Richie had been - is - so ass over tit for. Of course he found someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. It shouldn't be a surprise.

But it is, and it hurts. So, he does what he always does when he gets upset and doesn't want anyone to know - he gets loud.

"So wait, Eddie, you got _ married _?" He asks, and if it sounds just a little incredulous, well, sue him. 

Eddie bristles immediately, as Richie knew he would. 

"Yeah, why's that so fucking funny, dickwad?" He bites. Richie leans back in seat and tries to convince himself that it _ is _ funny, he's totally laughing at Eddie right now, yessiree, that's what's happening over here, big ol' barrel of chucks. It's on the tip of his tongue to ask _ to a woman? _ except he manages to catch himself in time. It's the sort of joke that means one thing coming from a deeply closeted teenager, but hits entirely different coming from a fully grown and openly gay man. So he quickly changes tack.

"What, to like, an actual human person?" He asks.

"Fuck you, bro; fuck. You."

And Richie does laugh, then, because he's missed this, missed Eddie's rapid-fire chatter, the way telling each other to go fuck themselves can mean a thousand different things and it's all in the intonation, in the gestures and the eye contact. 

Right now, though, it does genuinely mean _ go fuck yourself _.

"Fuck you!" Richie returns in a staggering display of wit. The others laugh along, entertained if not a bit bemused at them, but it's Bill that leans forward to ask,

"What about you, trashmouth, you married?"

There are a thousand ways Richie could answer that; some serious, but most not. And it isn't until the others voice their very loud, very clear opinions on how likely Richie is to be married that he decides which way he's going to go.

"Yeah, did you not hear this? What, you didn't know I got married?" He asks, and he plays it totally straight faced, like he doesn't believe that _ anyone _ could not hear about his hypothetical wedding, even people that he hasn't spoken to in two decades. Mike's chuckling and shaking his head a little - probably because he's a stalking stalker who stalks his old friends and knows full well that Richie isn't married - but the others are watching him intently. He glances to the side, just a little, to check Stan's reaction, because if anyone knows exactly where he's going with this bit, it'll be Stan. 

There's a flash of resignation in his eyes, before Eddie apparently catches the exchange and yelps, "you married _ Stan _?"

Which is - honestly so much better than the half-hearted jokes he'd been planning at the expense of Eddie's mom. There's a look of dawning horror on Stan's face, and Richie knows that he has a very brief window in which to land this. It's a fight to get his grin under control and school his face into something mildly hurt towards Eddie.

"Well you don't have to sound so shocked about it," he says, as Stan looks wildly to Mike for help. But Mike is already helpless with laughter, slumped back in his seat with one hand pressed to his mouth and tears gathering in his eyes. Just like when they were kids, the glow of pride that burns in Richie's chest at getting Mike - usually so serious, almost solemn - to the point of crying with laughter warms him right down to his toes. "Just because he's wildly out of my league, doesn't mean -"

"No," Stan chokes, finally regaining control of his vocal chords, just in time to make it sound like he's protesting Richie's self-deprecation; he looks at Eddie with visceral panic in his expression, although Eddie doesn't seem to notice. Honestly, it's like Richie planned it. He lets the smile he's been fighting curl his lips, does his best to make it look fond, even as Eddie tries to splutter an apology - his hand is clenched over the rim of his wineglass so hard that it's a miracle the damn thing hasn't shattered. God, Eddie had always been high strung, Richie thinks, but now he looks so tense it's a miracle he hasn't snapped himself in half under the strain. Mike's trying to get his breathing back under control; Bev looks like she's caught on, and it's nice to see that they're still so much on the same wavelength. Ben and Bill are both staring between Richie and Stan with wide eyes.

"Aw, babe, that's sweet, but you know it's true, you're way too good for me. I -"

He loses it.

Richie folds forwards and laughs until his stomach hurts. He slaps at the table a couple of times, and only half hears it when Stan mutters, "why are you like this?"

"Patty thinks I'm funny," Richie manages around his dying giggles.

"Stockholm syndrome. Temporary insanity. Pity," Stan says flatly, and Richie wheezes _ pity-Patty, _ which just sets him off again. He can hear Eddie starting to laugh too, although he sounds more confused than entertained. It used to be a sort of Pavlovian reaction, he remembers - that no matter how angry Eddie was at him, no matter how unfunny he found Richie's jokes, as soon as Richie started to laugh, Eddie would crack and start laughing too. Even if he did wind up trying to glare at Richie the whole time.

"Patty is my wonderful wife," Stan explains to the others while Richie continues to snort inelegantly into his fist. Eddie's relaxed back into his seat, and is listening to Stan with his eyebrows pushed together. Bev rests her chin in her hand and leans around Richie with a soft smile. "And if she didn't enable Richie's bullshit then she'd be perfect."

"Ah, the only woman I'll ever love," Richie sighs, because it's been more years than he likes to think about, and he still hasn't got over the thought of Patty willingly coming home with him. Or, more accurately, the fact that he hadn't noticed. Besides; he's already steeled himself for this. His sexuality isn't exactly a secret these days, but it had taken time and effort for him to be able to joke so candidly about with in front of strangers. And these guys aren't strangers. Richie is starting to realise that for a significant chunk of his early life, they were his _ everything _. "Except for my dearest Sonia, of course."

"Beep beep, asshole, my mother's dead," Eddie says; it's like a sigh of relief spreads through Richie's entire body. Not because Eddie's mom is dead - although there is a sense of vindictive pleasure there that he resolves to examine later - but because the exchange is so much the same, almost untouched by the years that have passed. Even the classic _ beep beep _ isn't enough to wrangle his mouth back under control for once.

"Really? But she was so lively last night?"

"I can't believe I managed to go twenty years without having to hear a Richie Tozier 'your mom' joke," Bill groans, but he's smiling so softly at them all that Richie can't take it to heart.

"It's mostly 'your dad' jokes these days," Richie concedes as Stan drops his head into his hands with a muttered _ lucky you _ at Bill. "But much like Beyonce or Stevie Nicks, attraction to Mrs. K is something that transcends sexuality."

"I hate you, I hate you, I'm going to superglue Lego in all your left shoes," Stan grumbles.

It's enough to make them all laugh. Stan's humour is rare, and often unintentional; Richie knows the threat is semi-serious.

The conversation that flows after that moves so quickly, so easily, that Richie can barely keep up. He flicks his attention around the table, half-listens to most of it, but he can't help the way he keeps returning to Eddie. Can't help the way he needles, and teases, and grins at him whenever he looks away. He flirts lightly with Ben to distract himself, and is floored by affection when Ben blushingly laughs along, in the way that people who didn't grow up being flirted with do. There's no intention behind it; nor in the way he winks at Mike and off-handedly asks if it was the farmwork or all the lifting books that gave him biceps the size of Richie's head. Bev pats Richie's cheek and stuffs his mouth with a potsticker when he asks if she's feeling left out. Bill snorts beer out of his nose twice in the space of half an hour, and mentions off-handedly that he arrived in Derry this morning and spent the afternoon goofing off with Mike, which is an interesting development. As soon as he looks away, Richie wiggles his brows at Mike until Stan pinches his side.

And Eddie unwinds further with every minute that passes with the Losers all crowded around the table, swapping food and stories faster and faster. He talks louder, laughs more freely, and swears more between the starters and mains than everyone else put together. Richie watches him from the corner of his eye when he's paying attention, and just outright watches when he isn't. He recognises this, he thinks. There's a pattern to it, almost, and Richie has never been as good at patterns as Stan or Mike, but he also isn't stupid, and he's never studied another topic with as much diligence as he studied Eddie Kaspbrak.

There were times that Eddie hadn't been able to hang out with them for weeks on end. Sometimes it was harmless enough - he and his mom would head out of town to visit her sisters pretty regularly, and occasionally the visits would stretch out for what felt like an eternity to Richie, who had still been too young and dumb to understand why it hurt so much when he couldn't see Eddie for long stretches of time. But sometimes, she would decide that Eddie had caught something; some terrible contagious disease, possibly from one of the Losers, or maybe just from the miasmas or whatever she thought was floating around Derry and making kids sick. The sort of something that required quarantining from everyone except the doctors and the pharmacist, and maybe even the priest, because why not cover all her bases while she was at it. She would keep him locked up, and Richie would try to scramble up the tree outside Eddie's room to let himself in, but when she felt Eddie was really bad she'd make him sleep downstairs in the guest room so he didn't have to navigate the stairs.

And when she finally decided that he'd recovered, when she finally could ignore the opinions of multiple doctors telling her that Eddie had a clean bill of health, she would let him back out to roam the streets of Derry once more. It was always Richie he found first, and when he did, he was always just like this. Like he'd managed to store up every word he'd wanted to say in the weeks of isolation, every moment of frustration with his mom, everything he hadn't been able to say or express in her presence, to finally let loose the instant he found Richie.

There are implications there, and Richie tells himself sternly that it's not really his business. If Eddie wants to tell them anything he won't be shy about it. At least, he never would have been. Who knows about now - certainly not Richie.

Richie is fucking middle-aged now, and he still struggles to learn where people’s boundaries lie - he rushes in headlong, and he often crosses several lines before he realises, but this is different. However much or little Eddie may have changed, Richie remembers every single time he’d put so much as a toe over the line and genuinely upset him. Right now, what Eddie wants is to work out all the pent up energy he has stored in his compact little frame, and finally, when he’s exhausted and pliant and honest, open up to one of them. Used to be that was Richie, or Bill if Richie had been too annoying in the meantime - maybe now there are other people he opens up to instead. Part of Richie - a big part, actually, he’s pretty proud of it - hopes so. He’s had Stan, and later Patty; even Steve to an extent. People he trusts, people he talks to. Richie wants to be that for Eddie, but he also desperately hopes there’s been someone like that in his life since they last saw each other.

He shakes the thought off - tells himself not to be so maudlin, and smiles absently at the server when she brings out a plate of fortune cookies. Her answering smile is just as absent; Richie reaches for his glass to hide a shiver. The table is quiet for a moment as the conversation stalls - he’s vaguely aware that Ben said his memories were coming back faster now. His own memories feel like they’re all in place, except for one thing. It must be a big thing, something huge, to have left this many holes in his brain, but he knows somehow, some instinct that he honed through a childhood spent in this shithole of a town, that it is all one thing. 

The others murmur an agreement, but say nothing else. Richie stares down at his drink, but he’s never been one to tolerate silence for long.

“Yeah, you know, when Mike called me I threw up? Isn’t that weird?. Like, I got nervous, and I got sick and threw up,” he says. Stan doesn’t glance up from where he’s staring at the table with single-minded focus. Richie nudges his side gently, and glances around the table. Everyone else is staring at him, with varying degrees of understanding. “I’m fine now, I mean, I feel very, um, very relieved to be here. With all you guys.”

It’s a lie.

No one will meet his eyes.

“When Mike called me, I crashed my car,” Eddie says, and he holds himself perfectly still as he speaks, which isn’t like Eddie at all, especially not an Eddie that _ crashed his fucking car, holy shit _. Eddie loved cars, may still love cars, but his voice is almost toneless as he talks about it. Like it means nothing to him. Like being in a car accident means nothing to the man that spent half of their childhood convinced he was going to die of septicaemia every time he got a splinter. Richie swallows hard against the urge to be sick all over again. So much for feeling fine.

“I know what you mean,” Ben says, rubbing his hands together - back and forth, over, under. “My, my heart felt like it was pounding, right out of my chest.”

“I thought it was just me,” Bev murmurs, watching Ben carefully.

Bill shakes his head; Richie recognises the way his mouth stretches around his words, knows that the stutter is coming a second before he manages to force out _ fear _.

“Wuh-why did we all feel like that, Mike?” Bill asks. It’s like a floodgate has opened, like the dam in the barrens has been kicked over again, and now that he’s started to stutter, he can’t stop. Mike can barely meet his eyes, but Richie can see the way he forces himself to anyway. Mike had always been so brave, so much braver than him - staying in a town that hated him so openly, for so long, and all so they could -

Could -

Richie doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember why it was so important that one of them stay, only that it _ was _ important. And that it wasn’t going to be him. And that he’d hated himself for that, had spent long hours hating himself for that, but he’d up and left anyway. Not quite at the first chance he got, but near enough.

“Mike, what d-do you r-rruuuh-remember that we don’t?” Bill says.

“I remember all of It,” Mike says, soft and measured, watching Bill’s face carefully for a reaction. Richie doesn’t watch Bill - for all the times he’d followed Bill, their fearless leader, for all the times he’d stared up at Bill like he hung the moon and stars as a kid, Richie knows that isn’t who he’s worried about right now.

Stan is so pale that Richie can count the scars that frame his cheeks. Usually such a faint silver that they can barely be seen, they stand out a livid purple now; almost as vibrant as they had been fresh and wet with blood. Richie can remember the exact colour, the way Stan had scrubbed at the drying blood with Richie’s filthy shirt when he’d offered it as a piss-poor replacement for a towel. Then he’d made a comment about it being piss-poor, which made Eddie screw up his nose because jokes about piss always did, and made Bill screw up his nose because he hated puns but only when Richie made them, and it was a pun because they’d all been down in the sewer.

In the sewer, where It -

_ Pennywise _

Richie doesn’t hear Stan say It through a clenched jaw. He’s too busy clenching his own in an effort not to vomit.

_ Pennywise _

“The fucking clown,” Eddie mutters, and starts patting his pockets for his inhaler.

_ Pennywise _

“Oh shit,” Ben and Bev both say.

_ Pennywise _

Richie doesn’t say anything. Can’t. He thinks of Patty, laughingly cataloguing all of the fears - rational and not - that Stan and Richie share. Thinks of all of the matching items on the list, thinks of the way it had hurt to try and remember when they started, thinks of the way they couldn’t remember ever discussing them. The way they both just knew. Thinks of it now, slots it into place alongside this. She’d joked that there must be some deep-rooted, shared trauma, but joked in the way that meant she was being far more serious than she or Richie were willing to delve into. Stan had chuckled half-heartedly, he thinks, and had gone to bed early, and none of them had ever brought it up again. Of course she was right, though. It’s Patty.

_ Pennywise _

_ Pennywise _

“It’s back,” he tunes in just in time to hear Mike say.

“Yeah,” Richie says, even as _ Pennywise _ continues to roll around in his brain, a jaunty little song of a word. “Yeah, we were afraid you were gonna say that.”


End file.
